Numbers 20:9

Summary

The verse narrates that Moses took the staff from before Yehovah's presence, in fulfillment of a prior command given to him. The action is presented as the direct continuation of preceding narrative events, and the final clause anchors the act in obedience to an earlier divine instruction.

Key words

• va-yiqqach ("and he took", H3947) — narrative vav prefixed to a qal verb, marking sequential past action: "and then he took."
• 'et ("", H0853) — direct object marker, signaling that hammatteh is the object of the verb, with no semantic content of its own.
• ha-matteh ("the rod", H4294) — noun with definite article, specifying a particular, previously identified staff rather than "a" staff.
• mi-li-fnei ("from before", H9006/H9005/H6440) — compound preposition built from "from" + "to" + the construct plural noun "face of," literally "from the face(s) of," used idiomatically for "from the presence of."
• tzivvahu ("he had commanded him", H6680) — piel perfect verb with third-person pronominal suffix "him," combining verb and object into one word; the piel stem intensifies the basic sense of commanding, and the perfect aspect marks the action as completed prior to the main narrative moment.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative vav construction va-yiqqach, a standard device in Biblical Hebrew for advancing storyline events in sequence: "and he took." The subject Mosheh follows immediately, then the object is introduced by the untranslatable marker 'et before the definite noun ha-matteh, "the rod" — the article implies this is a specific, already-known object rather than any rod.

The phrase mi-li-fnei Yehovah is built from two prepositions stacked together with the construct-plural noun fenei ("faces of"), yielding the idiom "from before Yehovah" — describing the staff's location relative to Yehovah's presence, not a physical face. The final clause, ka'asher tzivvahu, uses the relative particle 'asher with the comparative ka ("just as") followed by a piel perfect verb carrying its own object suffix -hu ("him"), compactly saying "as he had commanded him," with no separate pronoun or repeated divine name needed in the Hebrew syntax.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the location phrase as τὴν ἀπέναντι κυρίου ("the [rod] that is opposite/before the Lord"), describing the staff's position rather than reproducing the Hebrew's "from before" (mi-li-fnei) sense of removal from that location. The LXX also explicitly repeats κύριος ("the Lord") as the subject of "commanded," where the Hebrew uses only the suffixed pronoun -hu ("him") in tzivvahu, leaving the subject implicit from context. The Vulgate turns the prepositional phrase into a relative clause with an added verb, virgam quae erat in conspectu Domini ("the rod which was in the sight of the Lord"), introducing the verb "erat" ("was") not present as a separate word in the Hebrew construction.