Numbers 22:23

Summary

The verse narrates that the donkey saw malʼakh Yehovah ("angel of Yehovah", H4397/H3068) standing in the road with a drawn sword, and reacted by leaving the road and walking into the field. Balaam then struck the donkey to force her back onto the road.

Key words

• va-Te.re' ("and it saw", H7200) — qal narrative form (vav + prefix conjugation), marking the first event in the chain: the animal's perception precedes any human awareness in the story.
• ni.Tzav ("standing", H5324) — niphal participle, describing the angel's posture as an ongoing state observed by the donkey, not a completed action.
• she.lu.Fah ("drawn", H8025) — qal passive participle, feminine to agree with char.B ("sword", H2719); it describes the sword as already unsheathed, a fixed condition rather than an action being performed.
• va-Tet ("and it turned aside", H5186) — qal narrative, the donkey's own movement away from the road, distinct in stem from the later hiphil form of the same root.
• le-ha.to.Ta-h ("to turn it/her", H5186) — hiphil infinitive with 3rd feminine singular suffix ("her"), expressing Balaam's causative intent: he strikes the donkey in order to make her turn, using the same root (NTH) that described her own turning, but now in the causative hiphil stem.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure is a chain of four narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — Te.re' ("saw"), Tet ("turned aside"), Te.lekh ("went"), Yakh ("struck") — each introduced by the narrative va- (H9001), presenting the events as a sequential chain: seeing leads to turning, turning leads to walking into the field, and this leads to Balaam's striking. The donkey is grammatically feminine throughout (ha-'a.tOn, "the donkey", H0860), and all pronominal suffixes referring to her (-oh, -ah) are feminine, which the underlying Hebrew marks morphologically but which English "she/her" only approximates.

A notable grammatical feature is the repetition of the root NTH (H5186) in two different stems: first in the qal (Tet, "she turned aside," describing the donkey's own action) and later in the hiphil infinitive (ha.to.Ta-h, "to turn her," describing Balaam's attempt to cause her to turn back). This stem alternation shows the same verbal root used first for the donkey's self-directed movement and then for Balaam's causative action upon her, a distinction visible in Hebrew morphology but not always preserved as a wordplay in translation.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew va-Yakh... et-ha-'aTon ("and he struck... the donkey") does not specify an instrument. The LXX adds τῇ ῥάβδῳ ("with the staff/rod"), an instrument not present in the Hebrew text at this point. The Vulgate's cum verberaret ("when he was beating her") and vellet ad semitam reducere ("and wished to lead her back to the path") render the hiphil infinitive le-ha.to.Ta-h as a purpose clause with a finite verb, restructuring the Hebrew infinitive construction into two coordinated Latin clauses.