Numbers 16:13

Summary

The verse presents a rhetorical, indignant question: is it a small thing that you (Moses) brought us up from a land flowing with milk and honey only to kill us in the wilderness? It closes with an emphatic accusation that Moses is asserting dominance over the community. The Hebrew intensifies the final charge through a grammatical doubling not fully reproduced in translation.

Key words

• ham'at ("[is it] small", H4592) — with the interrogative ha (H9008) prefixed, this opens the verse as a rhetorical question expecting a negative answer ("is it a small/trivial thing...").
• he'elitanu ("you have brought up", H5927H) — hiphil perfect, causative: the subject (Moses) caused the action of "going up," with the pronominal suffix -nu (H9035, "us") as the direct object.
• zavat ("flowing of", H2100G) — qal participle, feminine singular construct, syntactically binding "land" to what follows ("a land, flowing-of, milk and honey").
• tistarer ("you will make yourself ruler", H8323A) — hithpael imperfect, reflexive/ongoing aspect: the subject acts upon himself, "ruling himself over."
• histarer ("really make yourself ruler", H8323A) — same root, but infinitive absolute; paired with the finite verb tistarer and the adverb gam ("also", H1571), this repetition creates a grammatical intensifier.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a double rhetorical question introduced twice by ki (H3588A), each clause framed by ha... ki / gam... ki structures typical of impassioned protest. The first clause uses the hiphil perfect he'elitanu to stress a completed causative act ("you caused us to go up"), followed by the infinitive construct lahamitenu ("to kill us", from H4191), which expresses purpose or result — the "bringing up" is presented as leading directly to death in the wilderness.

The second clause turns to the verb saror ("to rule", H8323A) in the hithpael, a reflexive stem indicating the subject making himself into a ruler rather than being made one. The grammatical core of the accusation lies in the pairing of the imperfect tistarer with the infinitive absolute histarer, joined by gam ("also/even"). This finite verb + infinitive absolute of the same root is a construction that intensifies or confirms the verbal action — grammatically marking the ruling as certain, repeated, or emphatic, a nuance not carried by the object "us" alone.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew verb with a noun-verb pairing, κατάρχεις ἡμῶν ἄρχων ("you rule over us, a ruler"), preserving the same-root emphasis through repetition. The Vulgate instead uses a subordinate clause, "nisi et dominatus fueris nostri" ("unless you have also dominated us"), which conveys the sense of added domination but does not reproduce the grammatical doubling found in the Hebrew tistarer...histarer.