Numbers 24:2

Summary

The verse narrates Balaam lifting his eyes to see Israel encamped by tribes, followed by the ruach Elohim ("spirit of God", H7307G + H0430G) coming upon him. The three verbs in sequence (lifting, seeing, the spirit coming) form a chain of narrative actions marking a turning point in the episode.

Key words

• va-yyissa ("and he lifted up", H5375M) — qal narrative form of the verb, establishing the first action in the sequence: Balaam's physical act of raising his eyes.
• einav ("his eyes", H5869A) — feminine dual noun in construct with the suffix "his," referring to both eyes as the organ of sight.
• shoken ("dwelling", H7931) — qal participle, masculine singular, describing Israel's state as continuous or characteristic ("the one dwelling/encamping") rather than a single completed action.
• shevatav ("his tribes", H7626H) — masculine plural noun in construct with suffix, specifying the tribal organization by which Israel is arranged.
• ruach Elohim ("spirit of God", H7307G construct + H0430G) — a construct chain where ruach ("spirit," feminine singular) is defined by Elohim ("God," morphologically plural noun).

What the text says

The verse is built on three narrative-vav clauses, each advancing the action: va-yissa ("and he lifted"), va-yar ("and he saw", H7200G), and va-tehi ("and it came to be", H1961). This chain structure is typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative sequence, where each verb picks up the timeline from the previous one. The subject of the first two verbs is Balaam; the subject of the third verb is ruach Elohim, marking a shift in agency — the action no longer originates from Balaam but happens to him, expressed through the preposition al ("on", H5921A) plus suffix "him" (H9033).

The participle shoken ("dwelling") describes Israel not through a finished action but as an ongoing state — Israel is depicted as characteristically or currently encamped "to its tribes" (li-shevatav), a construct phrase indicating the tribal arrangement as the mode of encampment. The direct object marker et (H0853) appears twice, before "his eyes" and before "Israel," marking them as the objects of "lifted" and "saw" respectively, though this marker itself carries no independent translation value.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders shoken ("dwelling", H7931) as ἐστρατοπεδευκότα ("having encamped"), and li-shevatav ("to his tribes") as κατὰ φυλάς ("according to tribes"), shifting the participle's durative nuance toward a completed military encampment. The Vulgate's in tentoriis commorantem ("dwelling in tents") adds the notion of "tents," which is not present in the Hebrew wording of this verse. Where the Hebrew text uses the construct phrase ruach Elohim ("spirit of God"), the LXX has πνεῦμα θεοῦ and the Vulgate spiritus Dei, both matching the construct sense directly.