Numbers 22:29

Summary

Balaam speaks to the donkey, accusing her of having mocked him, and expresses a wish: if he had a sword in his hand, he would kill her immediately. The verse consists of two parallel conditional-style statements built around the particle ki ("that/because") and the wish-particle lu ("if only").

Key words

• hit'alalt ("you have dealt wantonly", H5953A) — hithpael perfect, 2nd person feminine; the hithpael stem often carries a reflexive or intensive-abusive nuance, here describing the donkey's action toward Balaam as deliberate mockery or mistreatment.
• lu ("if", H3863) — a conjunction marking an unreal or counterfactual wish ("if only"), distinct from the ordinary conditional im; it introduces a situation Balaam knows is not the case (he has no sword).
• yesh ("there [is]", H3426) — existential particle asserting presence; combined with lu it forms the hypothetical "if there were."
• charev ("sword", H2719) — feminine singular noun, the object of the wished-for possession.
• harag'ti ("I killed", H2026) — qal perfect, 1st person; though morphologically a completed past action, in this conditional frame following lu... ki 'atah it expresses a hypothetical present/future result ("I would kill"), a use of the perfect for irrealis situations rather than a report of a past event.

What the text says

The sentence divides into two ki-clauses. The first, ki hit'alalt bi ("that you have dealt wantonly with me"), gives the reason for Balaam's anger — a completed accusation stated as fact via the hithpael perfect. The second unit, introduced by lu ("if only") plus the existential yesh, sets up a counterfactual condition: "if there were a sword in my hand." The apodosis follows with ki 'atah harag'ti-kh ("that now I have killed you"), where the perfect verb harag'ti does not describe something already accomplished but the hypothetical outcome tied to the unreal condition — a grammatical feature that word-for-word translation into English cannot preserve without shifting to "would kill." The feminine suffix -kh on harag'ti and the earlier feminine forms (hit'alalt, la'aton) confirm the addressee throughout is the female donkey.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate expands the single hithpael verb hit'alalt into two Latin verbs, "commeruisti, et illusisti mihi" ("you have deserved, and you have mocked me"), where the Hebrew and the LXX (ἐμπέπαιχάς, "you have mocked/deceived") each render it with one verb. The LXX renders the counterfactual construction with εἰ εἶχον... ἤδη ἂν ἐξεκέντησα ("if I had... I would have pierced"), using a Greek optative-conditional pattern that more explicitly marks unreality than the Hebrew perfect harag'ti does on its own.