Numbers 25:1

Summary

The verse opens a new narrative unit: Israel is said to be settled at Shittim, and from there the people begin sexual relations with women identified as "daughters of Moab." The sentence is built as two paired narrative clauses connected by the vav-consecutive, marking sequential action.

Key words

• va-yeshev ("it remained/settled", H3427) — qal narrative form, third person masculine singular; opens the story with a stative-type verb describing Israel's location.
• va-yachel ("it began", H2490C) — hiphil (causative) narrative form; introduces the onset of the action that follows, syntactically parallel to the first verb.
• ha-'am ("the people", H5971A) — definite singular noun, the grammatical subject that undertakes the action introduced by va-yachel.
• liznot ("to commit fornication", H2181) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed li ("to/in doing"); functions as the complement of va-yachel, specifying what the people began to do.
• benot Mo'av ("daughters of Moab", H1323G + H4124G) — feminine plural noun in construct state governing the proper name Moab, marking the object of the relation described by the infinitive.

What the text says

The verse is structured as two sequential narrative clauses, each opened by a vav-consecutive verb (va-yeshev, va-yachel), a construction typical of Hebrew narrative prose that presents events as one following another in time rather than as simultaneous. The first clause states Israel's location — ba-Shittim ("in the Shittim", H7851G with the definite article H9003) — using the qal form of yashav, which denotes remaining or dwelling in a place. The second clause shifts the grammatical subject to ha-'am ("the people"), a collective singular noun, and uses the hiphil verb yachel ("began") to introduce a new action expressed through the infinitive liznot ("to commit fornication"). The infinitive construction with prefixed li- indicates purpose or the content of what was begun, syntactically dependent on va-yachel. The final phrase, el benot Mo'av ("into the daughters of Moab"), uses the construct chain benot Mo'av ("daughters of Moab") preceded by the preposition 'el ("into/toward"), identifying the group with whom the described action occurred.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew va-yachel (hiphil of the root related to "begin") is rendered in the LXX as ebebēlōthē ("was profaned/defiled"), a different semantic angle than "began," reflecting an alternate reading tied to another sense of the same triliteral root. The Vulgate's fornicatus est populus and the Hebrew va-yachel ha-'am liznot both express the people's action, but the Vulgate omits the separate notion of "beginning," collapsing the two Hebrew verbal ideas (start + act) into a single finite verb.