Numbers 24:9

Summary

The verse closes Balaam's oracle with an image of Israel as a crouching lion that no one dares disturb, followed by a formula of blessing and cursing addressed to whoever blesses or curses "you" (Israel). The sentence is built as two parallel poetic lines, each ending in a passive participle that mirrors the other.

Key words

• ka.Ra' ("it crouched", H3766) — qal perfect, third person masculine, describing a completed posture.
• sha.Khav ("it lay down", H7901) — qal perfect, paired with the previous verb; two completed actions describing the same lying-down motion.
• ye.ki.Me.nu ("will he rouse it", H6965) — hiphil (causative) imperfect with pronominal suffix -nu ("it"); the causative stem indicates "causing to rise," combined with the interrogative mi ("who?", H4310) to form a rhetorical question.
• me.va.ra.Khei.kha ("blessers of you", H1288) — piel participle, masculine plural construct, followed by the suffix -kha ("your"); denotes those who habitually perform the blessing.
• va.Rukh / 'a.Rur ("blessed" / "cursed", H1288 / H0779) — qal passive participles, masculine singular, each closing its respective line with a fixed passive state rather than an active verb.

What the text says

The verse opens with two qal perfect verbs, ka.Ra' and sha.Khav, both describing the same subject in a completed state of crouching/lying down "like a lion" (ka.'a.Ri, H0738A) and "like a lioness" (khe.la.Vi', H3833C — two different nouns for lion/lioness set in parallel by the conjunction u-, "and"). This is followed by a rhetorical question built with the interrogative mi and the hiphil imperfect ye.ki.Me.nu: the causative stem marks the verb as "to cause to rise," so the clause literally asks "who will cause it to rise?" — implying no one will.

The second half of the verse is a chiastic parallelism: me.va.ra.Khei.kha barukh ("blessers of you, blessed") and ve.'o.re.Rei.kha arur ("and cursers of you, cursed"). In both lines, a plural participle (functioning as "those who do X") is paired with a singular passive participle repeating the same root — piel participle me.va.ra.Khei.kha answered by qal passive participle va.Rukh from the same root H1288; qal active participle 'o.re.Rei.kha answered by qal passive participle 'a.Rur from the same root H0779. The grammar produces a mirrored structure: subject-plural / predicate-passive-singular, repeated identically in both halves, so that the syntactic shape of the blessing clause and the cursing clause is symmetric in Hebrew.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the passive participles va.Rukh and 'a.Rur not as adjectival predicates but as finite perfect passive verbs, εὐλογοῦνται/εὐλόγηνται and κεκατήρανται ("have been blessed" / "have been cursed"), turning the Hebrew's static participial predication into completed verbal actions. The Vulgate breaks the Hebrew's symmetry further: it renders the blessing line with a future verb, "erit... benedictus" ("he will be blessed"), but the cursing line with a different construction, "in maledictione reputabitur" ("he will be reckoned in a curse"), where the Hebrew uses the same grammatical pattern (participle + passive participle) for both lines.