Numbers 20:8

Summary

God instructs Moses to take the staff and, together with his brother Aaron, assemble the congregation. Moses and Aaron are to speak to the rock in front of the people, after which water will come out, to be brought to the community and their livestock.

Key words

• kach ("take", H3947) — qal imperative, 2nd person masculine singular, addressed to Moses alone.
• hakhel ("assemble", H6950) — hiphil (causative) imperative, singular: Moses is commanded to cause the congregation to gather.
• dibartem ("you will speak", H1696) — piel, but in sequential perfect form and plural (2mp), shifting the addressee from Moses alone to Moses and Aaron together.
• sela' ("rock", H5553) — masculine singular noun, repeated twice (once with the preposition 'el "to", once with min "from").
• natan ("it will give", H5414) — qal sequential perfect, 3rd masculine singular, whose subject is the rock (grammatically masculine in Hebrew) with the suffixed form meimav ("its waters", H4325).

What the text says

The verse opens with two singular imperatives — kach ("take") and hakhel ("assemble") — both directed only at Moses, who alone is told to take the staff and to cause the congregation to gather. The grammar then shifts: with dibartem ("you will speak"), the verb becomes plural, showing that from this point the instruction includes both Moses and Aaron, matching the explicit subject 'atah ve-Aharon 'achikha ("you and Aaron your brother"). This verb, and those that follow — natan ("it will give"), hotze'ta ("you will bring out"), hishqita ("you will give drink to") — are all vav-consecutive (sequential) perfects, a chain that in narrative Hebrew expresses a sequence of future actions following from the initial commands, functioning like a series of connected instructions rather than isolated statements.

The rock (sela') is grammatically masculine, and the verb natan ("it will give") takes it as subject with a third-masculine-singular form, matched by the suffix in meimav ("its waters"). The construct forms 'einei ("eyes of") and be'iram ("livestock of... their") tie the water-giving action to being witnessed "before their eyes" (le-'einei-hem) and to the benefit of "their livestock."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew dibartem is a sequential perfect (plural), while both the LXX (λαλήσατε, aorist imperative plural) and the Vulgate (loquimini, present imperative plural) render it as a direct imperative, making the plural command explicit rather than implied through verbal sequence. Additionally, the Hebrew meimav ("its waters," masculine suffix, agreeing with the masculine noun sela') becomes τὰ ὕδατα αὐτῆς ("her waters") in the LXX, reflecting that πέτρα ("rock") is feminine in Greek — a grammatical gender shift arising from translation into Greek rather than a difference in meaning.