Numbers 25:8

Summary

The text narrates that a man pursued the Israelite man into a תqubbah ("tent", H6898) and pierced both him and the woman through her belly, after which the plague against the people of Israel stopped. The verse marks the resolution of the preceding narrative through two decisive verbs of action followed by a verb of cessation.

Key words

• va-yidqor ("and he pierced through", H1856) — qal narrative form, marking the decisive action following the preceding narrative vav chain.
• qubbah ("tent", H6898) — feminine singular noun with definite article; a specific term for a tent-structure, distinct from the more common ohel.
• shenei-hem ("both of them", H8147) — dual construct with 3rd person masculine plural suffix, grammatically binding the man and woman as a single pierced pair before the text specifies each one.
• qobatah ("her belly", H6897) — feminine singular construct noun with 3rd person feminine singular suffix, locating the piercing specifically in the woman's body.
• tte'atsar ("it was restrained", H6113) — niphal (passive) narrative form; the plague is grammatically the subject acted upon, not an agent that stops on its own.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four narrative verbs connected by the vav consecutive: yavo ("he went"), yidqor ("he pierced"), and te'atsar ("it was restrained"), each advancing the sequence of events in strict temporal order. The double object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) appears twice, first collectively marking "both of them" (shenei-hem) and then separately re-specifying "the man of Israel" and "the woman" — a construction that names the pair together before unpacking the identity of each victim individually.

The phrase 'el-qobatah ("into her belly") attaches grammatically only to ha-ishah ("the woman", H0802G), meaning the Hebrew text specifies the point of piercing for the woman but not explicitly for the man of Israel, whose fate is stated only through the shared verb yidqor. The final clause uses the niphal verb te'atsar, presenting the plague (ha-maggephah, H4046) as the grammatical subject of a passive process — the text states that the plague "was restrained," without naming an explicit agent of the restraining within this verse itself.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew ha-qubbah ("the tent", H6898) is rendered in the LXX as κάμινον ("furnace/oven") and in the Vulgate as lupanar ("brothel"), two distinct interpretive choices for the same structure-word. Regarding the location of piercing, the Hebrew attaches "into her belly" only to the woman; the LXX similarly specifies διὰ τῆς μήτρας αὐτῆς ("through her womb") for the woman only, while the Vulgate extends the anatomical detail to both figures with in locis genitalibus ("in the genital parts"), a divergence in how the piercing's location is distributed between the two victims across the versions.