Numbers 15:22

Summary

The verse opens a new legal case with a conditional clause: it envisions a situation in which the community errs and fails to carry out all the commandments that Yehovah spoke to Moses. It functions as the protasis (the "if" clause) introducing the collective sin regulations that follow in the passage.

Key words

• tishGu ("you will err", H7686) — qal imperfect, 2nd person plural masculine; describes an unintentional, ongoing or future error affecting the group addressed.
• ta'aSu ("you will observe/do", H6213A) — qal imperfect, 2nd person plural masculine, negated by lo' ("not", H3808); expresses failure to carry out an action, paired with tishGu as the second half of the condition.
• mitzVot ("commandments", H4687) — feminine plural noun, in construct with kol ("all", H3605), forming "all the commandments."
• diBer ("he has spoken", H1696G) — piel perfect, 3rd person masculine singular; the piel stem marks intensive or declarative speech, and the perfect aspect marks this speaking as a completed prior act relative to the present error.
• Khi ("if", H3588A) — conditional particle that opens the verse and sets up the entire clause as a hypothetical case to be addressed by subsequent legal provisions.

What the text says

The verse is built as a double conditional clause joined by ve ("and", H9002): "if you err" (ve-khi tishGu) and "and you do not do" (ve-lo ta'aSu). Both verbs are qal imperfect, second person plural masculine, which grammatically addresses a collective subject — the verse does not specify who is included, but the plural form implies more than one person is envisioned as capable of this error. The object of the second verb is marked by the direct object particle 'et (H0853, untranslated) followed by kol-ha-mitzVot ha-'Elleh ("all these commandments"), a construct phrase that treats the commandments as a defined, complete set.

The relative clause 'asher-diBer Yehovah 'el-Mosheh ("which Yehovah spoke to Moses") uses a piel perfect verb, diBer, indicating a completed act of speech that took place before the present hypothetical failure. This grammatical sequence — completed divine speech followed by a possible future failure to execute it — establishes the temporal logic of the passage: the commandments already exist as spoken instruction, and the case being described is a lapse in carrying them out.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tishGu ("you will err", H7686) with διαμάρτητε, a form of a Greek verb meaning to miss the mark or fail, while the Vulgate uses per ignorantiam praeterieritis ("you shall have passed over through ignorance"), explicitly introducing the notion of ignorance not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew verb itself. The Hebrew simply states the verb "to err" without specifying the cause, whereas the Vulgate's phrasing supplies an explanatory qualifier.