Numbers 14:29

Summary

Numbers 14:29 declares that the physical remains of the generation counted in the census — every male twenty years old and above — will fall in the wilderness, explicitly because that generation has repeatedly complained against the LORD. The verse ties the punishment (death in the wilderness) to the census figure and to the act of murmuring.

Key words

• mid.Bar ("wilderness", H4057B) — the location where the falling will occur, fronted in the sentence for emphasis.
• yi.pe.Lu ("they will fall", H5307J) — qal imperfect, expressing a future/ongoing event affecting the subject that follows.
• fig.rei ("corpses", H6297) — masculine plural construct, "corpses of," bound to the following pronominal suffix khem ("your", H9026), yielding "your corpses."
• pe.ku.dei ("enrolled [men]", H6485A) — qal passive participle construct, referring to those who were formally counted/registered.
• ha.li.no.Tem ("you have grumbled", H3885B) — hiphil perfect, a causative stem of a root meaning "to spend the night/lodge," used here for repeated verbal complaint, and marking completed action prior to the main clause.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause opens with the prepositional phrase ba-mid.Bar ha-zeh ("in this wilderness"), placed before the verb yi.pe.Lu ("they will fall"). This fronting puts spatial emphasis on the location of the event before naming the subject, fig.rei-khem ("your corpses"). The construct chain fig.rei... pe.ku.dei-khem... mis.par-khem links three nouns — corpses, enrolled ones, and number — all bound by the same second-person plural suffix khem, creating a tight grammatical connection between the census records and the coming deaths.

The age qualifier mi-Ben 'es.rim sha.nah va-ma'e.lah ("from a son of twenty years and up") specifies exactly which registered group is meant, echoing census language used elsewhere for military-age males. The relative clause introduced by 'a.Sher ("who") attaches the reason for the coming event: ha.li.no.Tem 'a.lai ("you have grumbled against me"). The hiphil perfect form of lin denotes a completed pattern of causing complaint, distinguishing it from a single simple-stem action — it frames the murmuring as a completed, repeated behavior that precedes and motivates the falling described in the imperfect verb.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders fig.rei ("corpses") as τὰ κῶλα ("the limbs/members"), a more specific bodily term than the Hebrew's general word for corpses, which the Vulgate follows more closely with cadavera ("corpses"). For pe.ku.dei-khem ("your enrolled ones"), the LXX splits the sense into two expressions, ἡ ἐπισκοπὴ ὑμῶν ("your oversight/census") and οἱ κατηριθμημένοι ὑμῶν ("those numbered among you"), while the Vulgate condenses it to qui numerati estis ("who have been numbered"), each version distributing the construct-chain meaning differently.