Numbers 15:33

Summary

The verse reports that the men who discovered a certain man gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron, and the entire congregation. The Hebrew syntax presents the accusers as a defined group ("the ones who found him") acting upon an already-identified offender ("him, gathering wood").

Key words

• yaqrivu ("they brought near", H7126H) — hiphil (causative) verb with narrative vav; the causative stem indicates the subjects actively caused the man to be brought forward, not that he came on his own.
• ha-motz'im ("the ones who found", H4672) — qal participle, masculine plural, with definite article; functions as a substantive ("the finders"), naming the group as the subject of the main verb.
• meqoshesh ("gathering", H7197A) — piel participle, masculine singular; the piel (intensive) stem describes the ongoing action being performed by "him" at the moment he was found, syntactically appositional to the object pronoun.
• 'etzim ("woods/sticks", H6086I) — masculine plural noun, the object of the gathering activity.
• 'edah ("congregation", H5712) — feminine singular noun in construct chain after kol ("all", H3605), forming "all of the congregation" as the final destination of the bringing.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative va-yaqrivu ("and they brought near"), a hiphil form that marks a causative action: the grammatical subject is not stated immediately but is revealed a few words later as ha-motz'im ("the ones who found"), a qal participle functioning as a noun phrase. This delayed subject creates a construction in which the object — 'oto ("him") — appears twice, first attached to the main verb and second attached to the participle meqoshesh ("gathering"), which itself takes 'etzim ("wood") as its own object. The doubling of 'oto links the two participial clauses tightly: the man who was found is the same man doing the gathering, with the piel participle describing his ongoing action at the time of discovery.

The destination of the action is marked by three parallel prepositional phrases beginning with 'el ("to"): to Moses, to Aaron, and to kol ha-'edah ("all the congregation"), each preposition repeated rather than combined, which in Hebrew narrative style gives equal syntactic weight to each named recipient.

Differences between versions

The LXX text as given adds a temporal phrase, "τῇ ἡμέρα τῶν σαββάτων" ("on the day of the sabbaths"), which has no corresponding element in the Hebrew word list provided. The LXX also adds "υἱῶν Ἰσραήλ" ("of the sons of Israel") after "congregation," an expansion not present in the Hebrew 'edah ("congregation", H5712) alone. The Vulgate condenses the verse considerably, rendering only "obtulerunt eum Moysi et Aaron et universae multitudini" ("they offered him to Moses and Aaron and to the whole multitude"), omitting explicit mention of the finders and the wood-gathering participle clauses that are present in the Hebrew.