Numbers 26:65

Summary

The verse explains why the census generation had died out: Yehovah had declared that they would certainly die in the wilderness, and indeed no man from that generation remained except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.

Key words

• 'a.Mar ("he had said", H0559) — qal perfect, marking a completed prior declaration by Yehovah, functioning as the ground/cause for what follows.
• Mot ("certainly ", H4191) — infinitive absolute of the same root as the following verb; paired with a finite verb it intensifies the certainty of the action.
• ya.Mu.tu ("they will die", H4191) — qal imperfect, expressing the future/ongoing outcome of the decree; combined with the infinitive absolute Mot it forms the emphatic construction "they will surely die."
• no.Tar ("he was left", H3498) — niphal perfect, passive in form, describing the state of survival (or lack of it) as a completed fact.
• ki... 'im- ("that... except", H3588B + H0518B) — a two-part subordinating construction functioning together as an exceptive clause, "except/only."

What the text says

The sentence opens with the particle ki (H3588A) introducing a causal clause: "for Yehovah had said to them." The verb 'a.Mar is perfect, placing the divine statement as an event prior to the narrated outcome — a report of what had already been decreed, not a new pronouncement in this scene. The content of that decree is rendered through the construction Mot yamutu: an infinitive absolute of H4191 followed by the imperfect of the same root. This doubling of the root is a standard Biblical Hebrew intensifying device, giving the sense "they will absolutely/certainly die," which single-word translations like "shall die" or "morerentur" cannot fully capture without an added adverb such as "surely."

The second half of the verse states the result using no.Tar, a niphal (passive) perfect verb: "not was-left." The passive form frames the absence of survivors as a completed situation rather than describing an active process of dying. The exception is marked by the compound particle ki im, literally "that if," which functions idiomatically as "except" or "only," introducing the two named survivors, Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun, each identified through the construct phrase ben/bin ("son of", H1121A) plus a personal name.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders lo... 'ish ("not... anyone") as "οὐδὲ εἷς" ("not even one"), an intensified phrasing not literally present in the Hebrew wording, though consistent with its sense. The Vulgate collapses the causal clause and the infinitive-absolute construction into "prædixerat... quod omnes morerentur" ("had foretold that all would die"), using "omnes" ("all") where the Hebrew has the third-person plural verb yamutu without an explicit "all," and does not reproduce the infinitive-absolute emphasis of Mot yamutu in a distinct grammatical form.