Numbers 25:10

Summary

This verse is a short narrative formula introducing direct speech from Yehovah to Moses. It contains no content of its own beyond announcing that a divine communication follows.

Key words

• va-yedaBer ("and he spoke", H1696G) — piel verb with narrative vav, marking the next event in the story sequence; the piel stem here carries the basic sense "to speak" (intensive/factitive nuance of the stem does not add extra force to this common verb).
• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name, functioning as the grammatical subject of the verb "he spoke."
• el- ("to", H0413) — preposition marking Moses as the addressee (recipient) of the speech.
• Mosheh ("Moses", H4872) — proper noun, indirect object of the verb, the person addressed.
• leMor ("saying", H0559) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed preposition le-, functioning to introduce the forthcoming quoted speech; literally "to say/in saying."

What the text says

The verse follows a fixed syntactic pattern common in narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible: narrative-vav + verb + subject + prepositional phrase (addressee) + infinitive introducing speech. The initial va-yedaBer ("and he spoke") is placed first, following the verb-subject-object word order typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative clauses using the wayyiqtol (narrative past) form. This word order signals sequential action in the story — this speech-event follows whatever precedes it in the narrative.

The subject Yehovah comes immediately after the verb, and the prepositional phrase el-Mosheh ("to Moses") specifies the addressee. The final element, the infinitive leMor ("saying"), is a standard formulaic device in Biblical Hebrew that opens direct discourse — it does not carry independent semantic weight beyond signaling "and here is what was said." This construction (verb of speaking + leMor) appears repeatedly throughout the narrative and legal sections of the Pentateuch as the standard introduction to divine speech.

The verse itself communicates no content — it is purely a transitional and introductory formula, structurally identical to many other instances of this phrase elsewhere in the text.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew va-yedaBer ("and he spoke") is a narrative wayyiqtol form; the LXX renders it with the aorist indicative elalesen ("he spoke"), and the Vulgate uses the perfect Dixit ("he said"), both of which express simple past narrative action, matching the Hebrew's sequential function without notable divergence in meaning. All three versions preserve the same basic structure: subject (Yehovah/Kyrios/Dominus), addressee (Moses/Mosen/Moysen), and a marker introducing speech (leMor / legon / no explicit equivalent in the Vulgate, which proceeds directly to the quoted speech).