Numbers 23:13

Summary

Balak invites Balaam to another location, telling him that from there he will see only "its edge" (a portion of the people) rather than the whole company, and asks him to curse it from that vantage point.

Key words

• lekha ("come", H1980H) — qal imperative with paragogic he attached, an intensified or emphatic form of the command "go/come."
• na' ("please", H4994) — a particle of entreaty softening the imperative, marking polite request rather than bare command.
• qatzehu ("its edge/outskirt", H7097A) — masculine singular noun in construct state with a 3ms pronominal suffix ("edge of it"), referring back to the collective entity being viewed.
• kullo ("all of it", H3605) — construct noun with 3ms suffix, paired with the negation lo' ("not", H3808) to state that the totality will not be seen.
• tir'ennu ("you will see it", H7200G) — qal imperfect 2ms with 3ms object suffix, repeated three times in the verse (vv. 13, twice more as tir'eh) to structure the contrast between partial and full sight.

What the text says

The verse is built as direct speech introduced by va-yo'mer ("and he said", H0559), a standard narrative-vav construction. Balak's proposal moves through a sequence of three parallel imperfect verbs from the root ra'ah ("to see", H7200G): first a general "you will see it" tied to the new location (asher tir'ennu mi-sham, "where you will see it from there"), then a restrictive clause built on the construct noun qatzehu ("its edge") plus tir'eh, and finally the negated counterpart ve-khullo lo' tir'eh ("and all of it you will not see"). This triple repetition of the same verb root with different objects (edge vs. totality) creates a grammatical contrast entirely carried by construct-suffix nouns rather than separate adjectives — Hebrew expresses "partial" and "total" through qatzeh + suffix and kol + suffix, both governed by the same seeing-verb.

The final clause, ve-qovno-li mi-sham ("and curse it for me from there", H6895 imperative + H9005 preposition-suffix "for me" + H8033G "from there"), closes the speech with another imperative, echoing the lekha ("come") of the opening and framing the verse as a request-and-command pair: come — see partially — curse. The 3ms suffixes throughout (-nu, -hu, -o) all refer to a single grammatical object treated as a collective singular, though what is being seen/cursed is a group of people.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate specifies the object explicitly as "Israel" (unde partem Israël videas), a proper name not present in the Hebrew text, which uses only pronominal suffixes ("it/him"). The LXX and modern English translations (BSB, SBLIBRE) render the same suffixes with plural pronouns ("them"), treating the Hebrew masculine singular collective as a plural group, while the Hebrew grammatical number itself remains singular throughout.