Numbers 22:33

Summary

The divine messenger explains to Balaam why the donkey turned aside three times: it saw him and avoided him. The speech closes with a conditional statement contrasting what would have happened to Balaam and to the donkey if she had not turned aside.

Key words

• tir'aNi ("it saw me", H7200G) — qal narrative verb with 1st-person suffix; the donkey is the grammatical subject, "seeing" the angel that Balaam himself could not see.
• zeh shaLosh regaLim ("this three feet/times", H2088/H7969/H7272) — an idiomatic construction combining the demonstrative zeh with the numeral and the noun regalim ("feet," used here to mean "times" or "occasions").
• nateTah ("it had turned aside", H5186) — qal perfect, marking completed action, introduced by 'ulai ("perhaps", H0194), expressing a hypothetical past.
• haRagti ("I killed", H2026) — qal perfect, 1st person; despite the perfect (completed-action) form, the context (ki 'attah, "if now") gives it a conditional, counterfactual sense ("I would have killed").
• hecheYeiti ("I preserved alive", H2421) — hiphil perfect of the root ḥyh ("to live"); the causative stem marks an action performed upon another (making someone live), contrasted directly with haRagti.

What the text says

The verse is built on two narrative clauses (va-tir'aNi, va-Tet, both introduced by the narrative vav) reporting the donkey's actions, followed by a conditional clause introduced by 'ulai ("perhaps") and ki ("if"). The Hebrew uses perfect-tense verbs (nateTah, haRagti, hecheYeiti) throughout, even though the sense is hypothetical or counterfactual — a feature of Biblical Hebrew where the perfect aspect can express certainty about an unrealized past outcome rather than strict past tense as in English or Spanish.

The pairing of haRagti ("I killed", qal) and hecheYeiti ("I preserved alive", hiphil) creates a grammatical and semantic contrast: one verb denotes ending life, the other — in the causative hiphil stem — denotes actively causing life to continue. The direct object markers 'oteKah ("you", H0853+H9031) and 'oTah ("her", H0853+H9034) mark the two contrasted objects of these opposite actions, Balaam and the donkey respectively.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) restructures the conditional logic: "et nisi asina declinasset de via... te occidissem, et illa viveret" ("and unless the donkey had turned from the way... I would have killed you, and she would live"), rendering the second verb (hecheYeiti, "I preserved alive") as a simple future ("would live") rather than preserving the parallel perfect-tense causative structure of the Hebrew. The LXX renders zeh shaLosh regalim ("this three feet/times") as "τρίτον τοῦτο" ("this third [time]"), a slightly different idiomatic rendering of the Hebrew's numeral-plus-noun phrase for repeated occurrences.