Numbers 17:12

Summary

The Israelites cry out to Moses, declaring three times in rapid succession that they are perishing or already perished. The Hebrew uses repeated perfect-tense verbs from two roots to build an escalating cry of alarm.

Key words

• hen ("here!", H2005) — an interjection that opens the speech, drawing attention to the crisis, often rendered "behold" or "look."
• gava'nu ("we will die", H1478) — qal perfect, 1st person plural: grammatically a completed action ("we have died"), though the context and most translations treat it as an immediate/near-certain event ("we are dying" or "we will die").
• avadnu ("we will perish", H0006) — qal perfect, repeated twice in the verse (positions 11 and 14), framing the statement about "all of us."
• kullanu ("all of us", H3605 + H9025) — construct noun kol ("all of") with the 1st person plural suffix -nu ("our/us"), intensifying the totality of the group affected.

What the text says

The verse is built from three short clauses in sequence: gava'nu ("we perish"), avadnu ("we perish"), and kullanu avadnu ("all of us we perish"). All three verbs are qal perfect, a form that in Biblical Hebrew normally marks a completed action but can also express an event experienced as certain or already underway from the speaker's perspective — hence translations vary between past ("we are perished"), present ("we are perishing"), and future ("we will die").

The repetition of the root '-b-d (H0006) at both the middle and the end of the verse creates a frame: the sentence opens with gava'nu ("we die") from a different root (H1478), then closes with avadnu... avadnu, doubling the same verb around the phrase kullanu ("all of us"). This structural repetition intensifies the cry without needing additional vocabulary — the Hebrew builds emphasis through recurrence of sound and root rather than through modifiers.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the three Hebrew clauses with three distinct Greek verbs — ἐξανηλώμεθα, ἀπολώλαμεν, παρανηλώμεθα — preserving the threefold structure but varying the vocabulary rather than repeating one root as the Hebrew does with avadnu.

The Vulgate compresses the Hebrew's three clauses into two: "consumpti sumus, omnes perivimus," dropping the second occurrence of avadnu and merging kullanu ("all of us") directly into the final clause. This produces a shorter Latin statement than the triple Hebrew repetition.