Numbers 19:11

Summary

Numbers 19:11 establishes that a person who comes into contact with a human corpse becomes ritually unclean for a period of seven days. The verse is structured as a conditional/participial clause followed by a consequence stated with a sequential verb form.

Key words

• ha-noge'a ("the one touching", H5060) — qal participle with definite article, functioning as a substantive: "the one who touches," identifying the subject by an ongoing or characteristic action rather than a simple past event.
• met ("dead [body]", H4191) — qal participle used as a noun, "a dead one" / corpse, the object of contact.
• nefesh ("corpse of / person of", H5315M) — feminine singular construct, here in the phrase le-khol nefesh adam, "for any person of a human being," binding to the following noun.
• adam ("a person/human", H0120G) — completes the construct chain nefesh adam, "a human person," specifying the category of the dead body touched.
• tame ("he will be unclean", H2930A) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative logic: the touching leads directly to this resulting state.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with ha-noge'a ("the one touching", H5060), a participle that functions as the grammatical subject of the whole verse — literally "the toucher." This participial construction is common in legal/case texts: it does not describe a single past action but designates a class of person defined by an act, similar to "whoever touches." The object of that touching is introduced by the preposition be ("in", H9003) plus met ("dead [body]", H4191), itself a participle used substantively for "a dead one."

The phrase le-khol nefesh adam extends this object: le ("of", H9005) plus khol ("every", H3605) plus the construct pair nefesh adam ("corpse of a person", H5315M + H0120G). This construct chain links "corpse/person" tightly to "human," so the touching is specified as contact with the corpse of any human individual, as opposed to other kinds of dead bodies discussed elsewhere in the chapter.

The clause then shifts from participle to a finite verb: ve-tame ("and he will be unclean", H9001 + H2930A), a sequential perfect that in Hebrew narrative and legal syntax expresses the consequence following from the initial condition. The duration of the resulting state is given by the construct phrase shiv'at yamim ("seven of days", H7651 + H3117G), specifying a fixed seven-day period.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the construct phrase nefesh adam ("corpse of a person") with τεθνηκότος ἀνθρώπου ("of a dead man"), collapsing the double-noun construct into a single adjectival phrase. The Vulgate similarly simplifies to cadaver hominis ("corpse of a man"), matching the Hebrew's semantic content but not preserving its construct-chain grammar. The BSB and SBLIBRE render the participle ha-noge'a as "whoever touches," a functional equivalent that conveys the class-designating force of the Hebrew participle but does not itself carry participial morphology in English or Spanish.