Numbers 18:20

Summary

Yehovah tells Aaron that he will not receive a landed inheritance or a share of property among the Israelites. Instead, Yehovah himself declares that he is Aaron's chelek ("share") and nachalah ("inheritance") in the midst of the people of Israel.

Key words

• 'ar.Tza ("land", H0776G) — feminine singular construct noun with 3mp suffix ("their"), specifying the land that will not go to Aaron.
• tin.Chal ("you will have an inheritance", H5157) — qal imperfect, 2ms, expressing a future/ongoing negated action ("you will not inherit").
• Che.lek ("a share", H2506A) — masculine singular noun, first used absolutely, then repeated in construct form (chel.ke.kha, "your share") to describe what Yehovah himself becomes for Aaron.
• na.cha.La.te.kha ("your inheritance", H5159) — feminine singular construct noun with 2ms suffix, paired with chel.ke.kha to form a double designation of Yehovah's relationship to Aaron.
• 'a.Ni ("I", H0589) — independent personal pronoun, placed emphatically before the predicate nouns, marking Yehovah as the subject who "is" the share and inheritance.

What the text says

The verse is built on a contrast between negated nouns of possession ('ar.Tza, "their land"; Che.lek, "a share") and the affirmed identity of Yehovah as Aaron's chelek and nachalah. The Hebrew places the negation lo' ("not", H3808) before both the verb tin.Chal and the noun-verb pair Che.lek...yih.Yeh ("it will belong"), creating a parallel structure: "in their land you will not inherit" / "and a share will not belong to you among them." This double negation is answered by the emphatic pronoun 'a.Ni ("I") opening the final clause, which shifts the grammatical subject from Aaron's absence of possession to Yehovah's own presence as possession.

The construct chain chel.ke.kha ("your share") and na.cha.La.te.kha ("your inheritance") uses the same root nouns denied to Aaron earlier (Che.lek, "share") but now attaches them directly to Yehovah through the pronoun 'a.Ni. Grammatically, this creates an identity statement: Yehovah occupies the syntactic slot of the noun that Aaron will not receive from the land. The phrase be.Tokh be.Nei Yis.ra.'El ("in the midst of the sons of Israel", H8432, H1121G) locates this share spatially — not in territorial land, but within the community of Israel itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders bə-'artzam ("in their land") as ἐν τῇ γῇ αὐτῶν, matching the Hebrew closely, and adds ὅτι ("because") before the final clause, making the causal link explicit where the Hebrew simply juxtaposes the statements. The Vulgate's nihil possidebitis ("you will possess nothing") intensifies the negation with nihil ("nothing") compared to the Hebrew's simple negated verb lo' tin.Chal ("you will not inherit"), and pars et haereditas tua mirrors the double noun structure of chel.ke.kha and na.cha.La.te.kha without the emphatic pronoun 'a.Ni rendered separately, since Latin verb agreement absorbs the pronoun.