Numbers 24:18

Summary

The verse announces future events involving Edom, Seir, and Israel: Edom and Seir will become "a possession" (יְרֵשָׁה, yereshah), and Israel will act with strength. The two clauses about Edom/Seir are grammatically parallel, both built on the same verb-noun pair.

Key words

• ha.Yah ("it will be", H1961) — qal sequential perfect, used twice; this verb form continues a chain of predicted future events rather than describing a past state.
• ye.re.Shah ("a possession", H3424) — feminine singular noun, repeated identically in both clauses, linking Edom and Seir under the same fate grammatically.
• 'o.ye.Va ("enemies", H0341) — qal participle, masculine plural, in construct form with a pronominal suffix ("its/his enemies"); the construct chain ties this word directly to what precedes it (Seir), but the referent of the suffix is not made explicit by the grammar alone.
• 'O.seh ("doing", H6213A) — qal participle, masculine singular, paired with Cha.yil ("strength", H2428G) to form the idiomatic expression translated as Israel's future action.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as two mirrored clauses: ve-hayah 'Edom yereshah ("and Edom will be a possession") and ve-hayah yereshah Se'ir 'oyevav ("and Seir, its enemies, will be a possession"). The repetition of hayah + yereshah creates a tight parallelism between Edom and Seir as grammatical subjects undergoing the same transformation. The word 'oyevav ("its enemies") is attached to Seir in construct form with a suffix, but the Hebrew does not specify whose enemies these are — the antecedent of the pronominal "its/his" is grammatically ambiguous within the clause itself.

The final clause shifts to a participial construction, Yisra'el 'oseh chayil — literally "Israel [is] doing strength" — a common idiom pairing the participle 'oseh ("doing") with the noun chayil ("strength," "might," "valor") to describe a continuing or characteristic action, rather than a single completed act.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Se'ir as "Ἠσαῦ" (Esau) rather than transliterating "Seir," and adds the explicit phrase "ὁ ἐχθρὸς αὐτοῦ" ("his enemy") as an apposition clarifying the referent left ambiguous in the Hebrew construct chain. The Vulgate diverges further in relational direction: "hæreditas Seir cedet inimicis suis" states that the inheritance of Seir will yield to his enemies, whereas the Hebrew's parallel structure presents Seir itself becoming a possession (yereshah) without specifying that it passes to an adversary. The Vulgate also splits the Hebrew's tight two-part parallelism into three distinct clauses, obscuring the repeated hayah–yereshah pairing found in the Hebrew.