Numbers 14:7

Summary

Numbers 14:7 reports the direct speech of Joshua and Caleb (implied by context) to the entire assembly of Israel, declaring that the land they had crossed in order to spy it out is an extremely good land. The verse is built as a report clause introducing a nominal sentence of evaluation.

Key words

• va-yyo'meru ("and they said", H0559) — qal verb in narrative form (vav + prefix conjugation), marking the next event in the story sequence.
• 'edat ("congregation of", H5712) — feminine singular construct, linking to bnei Yisra'el to form "congregation of the sons of Israel."
• 'asher ("which/that", H0834A) — relative particle introducing a subordinate clause describing ha-'aretz ("the land").
• latur ("to spy out", H8446) — qal infinitive with prefixed le- ("to"), expressing purpose: the reason the land was crossed.
• me'od me'od ("very, very", H3966 x2) — cardinal-type adverb repeated twice, intensifying the adjective tovah ("good", H2896A).

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative verb va-yyo'meru ("and they said"), followed by the addressees marked with the preposition 'el ("to") plus the construct chain kol-'adat bnei Yisra'el ("all the congregation of the sons of Israel"), and the infinitive le'mor ("saying") introducing direct speech. This is a standard reported-speech formula.

The quoted content is a nominal (verbless) sentence: ha-'aretz ... tovah ha-'aretz me'od me'od — literally "the land ... [is] good, the land, very very." The Hebrew places the predicate tovah ("good") between two occurrences of ha-'aretz ("the land"), a repetition (epanalepsis) that is not reproduced identically in translations: the subject noun ha-'aretz is stated once before the relative clause ('asher 'avarnu vah latur 'otah, "which we passed through in it to spy it out") and again immediately before the intensifier. The relative clause itself contains two verbs referring to the same action from different angles: 'avarnu ("we passed", qal perfect, completed action) and the infinitive latur ("to spy out"), expressing the purpose of that passing. The double me'od me'od ("very, very") is an emphatic repetition of the same adverb rather than two different words, intensifying the adjective tovah beyond what a single occurrence would convey.

Differences between versions

The LXX (κατεσκεψάμεθα, "we spied out") and the Vulgate (circuivimus, "we went around/traversed") both render the relative clause with a single verb, collapsing the Hebrew's two-verb sequence ('avarnu ... latur, "we passed ... to spy out") into one action. The Hebrew's structural repetition of ha-'aretz ("the land") before and after the relative clause is not preserved as a doubled noun in the Greek or Latin, which state the predicate "good" only once in relation to a single subject noun. The doubled intensifier me'od me'od is kept as a repetition in the LXX (σφόδρα σφόδρα) but rendered as a single phrase, "valde bona" ("greatly good"), in the Vulgate, and as "en gran manera" or "sumamente" (single intensifying phrase) in the Spanish versions.