Numbers 14:34

Summary

The verse establishes a punishment formula: the forty days the spies explored the land will become forty years of consequence, one year for each day. The passage closes with a statement that the people will come to know something called tenu'ah ("opposition", H8569) from God.

Key words

• tartem ("you spied out", H8446) — qal perfect, 2nd person masculine plural, completed action; refers to the prior reconnaissance mission of the spies.
• tis'u ("you will bear", H5375) — qal imperfect, ongoing/future action; the root nasa can mean "to carry" or "to bear [a burden/guilt]," here applied to avonot ("iniquities").
• avonotei ("iniquities of", H5771) — feminine plural construct, linked to the suffix -khem ("your," H9026); construct form requires a following possessor, completed by "your."
• tenu'ati ("my opposition", H8569) — feminine singular construct + 1st person suffix ("my"); a rare noun from the root meaning "to hinder" or "oppose."
• va-yda'tem ("and you will know", H3045) — sequential (vav-consecutive) perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by tis'u, marking a resulting state of knowledge.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a prepositional phrase, be-mispar ha-yamim ("by the number of the days"), governed by a relative clause, asher tartem et-ha'aretz ("which you spied out the land"), specifying the forty days (arba'im yom, H0705 + H3117). The text then repeats the phrase yom la-shanah ("a day for the year") twice in succession — a grammatically redundant doubling that functions as an emphatic ratio-formula, fixing the day-to-year correspondence before the main clause resumes.

The main verb tis'u ("you will bear," qal imperfect) governs the object et-avonoteikhem ("your iniquities"), a construct chain meaning literally "the iniquities of you [plural]." The noun avon (H5771) in Biblical Hebrew can denote both the wrongdoing itself and the punishment/consequence it incurs; the imperfect verb form frames this as an action extending across the following forty years (arba'im shanah).

The final clause uses a vav-consecutive perfect (va-yda'tem, "and you will know"), which continues the temporal sequence set by the imperfect tis'u, indicating a state that follows or accompanies the forty-year period. The object of this knowing is tenu'ati ("my tenu'ah"), a construct noun with a first-person suffix. The base noun H8569 appears rarely in the provided lexical data and is glossed here as "opposition."

Differences between versions

The final noun tenu'ati ("my opposition", H8569) is rendered divergently: the LXX gives τὸν θυμὸν τῆς ὀργῆς μου ("my wrath of anger"), and the Vulgate gives ultionem meam ("my vengeance"). Both diverge from the Hebrew term, which the word-by-word data glosses as "opposition" rather than wrath or vengeance. Additionally, the Vulgate structures the day-year correspondence as a separate clause ("annus pro die imputabitur," "a year shall be reckoned for a day") rather than preserving the Hebrew's twofold repetition of yom la-shanah.