Numbers 24:8

Summary

The verse describes God bringing a subject (grammatically "him," referring to Israel as a collective) out of Egypt, compares this subject's power to the horns of a wild ox, and describes it consuming hostile nations, breaking their bones, and piercing them with arrows.

Key words

• moti'o ("bringing him out", H3318) — hiphil (causative) participle with pronominal suffix; the participle form frames this as an ongoing or characteristic action of God ("the one who brings him out") rather than a single past event.
• to'afot ("horns of", H8443) — feminine plural construct; used figuratively to convey strength, paired with re'em ("wild ox", H7214) in a comparison of power.
• yokhal ("it will consume", H0398) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular; grammatically the subject is not repeated here, so the "it/he" that acts is inferred from the earlier singular participle moti'o.
• yegarem ("it will break", H1633) — piel (intensive) imperfect; the piel stem intensifies the action of breaking, applied to atzmoteihem ("their bones", H6106), whose suffix is plural ("their"), referring to the nations.
• yimchatz ("it will wound", H4272) — qal imperfect, closing the sequence of three parallel singular-subject verbs (yokhal, yegarem, yimchatz) that describe the same singular agent acting on plural enemies.

What the text says

The sentence opens with El ("God", H0410) as the explicit subject of the participle moti'o, establishing that the bringing-out from Egypt is God's action, directed toward a third-person singular object ("him"). The comparison ke-to'afot re'em lo ("like the horns of a wild ox, to him") attaches strength imagery to this same singular referent through the suffix lo ("to him").

The three following verbs — yokhal, yegarem, yimchatz — are all third-person masculine singular imperfects, maintaining grammatical continuity with the singular subject established earlier, while their objects (goyim tzarav "nations, his adversaries"; atzmoteihem "their bones") are plural. This creates a pattern where a singular collective agent (readable as Israel, referenced through the third-person suffixes attached to moti'o and lo) acts upon multiple plural enemies. The suffixes shift between "his" (tzarav, chitzav) and "their" (atzmoteihem), consistently marking the enemies as plural while the acting subject remains singular throughout.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders to'afot ("horns of") as doxa ("glory") rather than a term for horns or strength directly. Where the Hebrew verbs yokhal, yegarem, yimchatz are all third-person singular, the Vulgate uses plural verbs (devorabunt, confringent, perforabunt — "they will devour... they will break... they will pierce"), shifting the grammatical number of the acting subject from singular to plural. The LXX also renders yegarem ("it will break [bones]") with ekmyelieîn ("to suck out the marrow"), a different image from the Hebrew's breaking of bones.