Numbers 20:13

Summary

The verse identifies the location "waters of Meribah" as the place where the Israelites quarreled with Yehovah, and states that Yehovah showed himself holy among them. It functions as a closing summary statement for the episode narrated earlier in the chapter.

Key words

• me.ri.Vah ("Meribah", H4809) — proper name built on the root meaning "quarrel/strife"; here in construct with mei ("waters of", H4325), forming the place-name "waters of Meribah."
• ra.Vu ("they quarreled", H7378) — qal perfect, third person plural, marking a completed past action; the subject is ve.nei-Yis.ra.'El ("the people of Israel").
• 'et- ("with", H0854) — preposition linking the verb of quarreling to Yehovah (H3068), specifying against whom the action occurred.
• i.yi.ka.Desh ("he showed himself holy", H6942) — niphal (passive/reflexive) verb in the narrative form (vav + imperfect), indicating a following consequential event; the niphal stem implies the subject undergoes or manifests the action rather than performing it directly on an object.
• Ba-m ("among them", H9003+H9038) — preposition with pronominal suffix "them," specifying the location/sphere in which the holiness was manifested — the people themselves.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the pronoun He.mah ("they", H1992), pointing back to the waters just mentioned in the preceding narrative, and then names them: mei Meribah ("waters of Meribah"). The relative particle 'a.Sher ("where", H0834) introduces a subordinate clause explaining why this place received that name: ra.Vu ve.nei-Yis.ra.'El 'et-Yehovah ("the people of Israel quarreled with Yehovah"). The verb ra.Vu is qal perfect, denoting a straightforward, completed action performed by the people as grammatical subject, with Yehovah as the object of the preposition 'et-, marking him as the one they contended against.

The clause is then joined by the narrative vav to i.yi.ka.Desh ("he showed himself holy", H6942), a niphal verb. The niphal stem here conveys that the subject (Yehovah, understood from the previous clause) is the one made manifest as holy, rather than actively "sanctifying" something external — the grammatical voice differs from a simple active statement of an action performed on an object. This manifestation occurs Bam ("among them", H9003+H9038), the same group who had quarreled, tying the two actions — the quarrel and the manifestation — together within the same location and human group.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders i.yi.ka.Desh with ἡγιάσθη, a passive form matching the niphal sense ("he was sanctified/shown holy"). The Vulgate similarly uses sanctificatus est ("he was sanctified"), a passive construction. The Hebrew ra.Vu ("they quarreled") is rendered in the LXX as ἐλοιδορήθησαν ("they reviled/rebuked"), a stronger term than simple quarreling, while the Vulgate's jurgati sunt ("they quarreled/disputed") stays closer to the Hebrew sense of strife.