Numbers 27:13

Summary

The verse records God speaking to Moses, telling him that after he has seen the land, he will be "gathered to his people," just as his brother Aaron already was. The Hebrew uses the same passive verb for both deaths, linking Moses' end explicitly to Aaron's.

Key words

• ra'itah ("you will see", H7200G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by the preceding verse; second person masculine, referring to Moses viewing the land.
• ne'esafta ("you will be gathered", H0622) — niphal (passive/reflexive) sequential perfect; the passive form presents the action as something happening to the subject rather than an action he performs.
• 'ammekha ("your peoples", H5971B) — masculine plural noun in construct with the following suffix, literally "peoples of you," i.e., "your kin/ancestors."
• ka'asher ("just as", H0834D) — relative particle combined with the preposition ka ("like"), creating the comparison clause that follows.
• ne'esaph ("he was gathered", H0622) — same niphal root as word 6, but in the simple perfect (completed action) rather than sequential perfect, describing Aaron's prior death as an established fact.

What the text says

The sentence is built as two chained clauses using the sequential perfect (ve- + perfect), a common narrative construction that presents successive future actions: first ra'itah ("you will see [it]"), then ne'esaphta ("you will be gathered"). Both verbs share the second-person masculine form, keeping Moses as the grammatical subject throughout. The direct object marker 'otah (word 3-4, H0853+H9034) attaches the feminine suffix "her/it," referring back to the land mentioned in the preceding context, though the land itself is not repeated in this verse.

The comparison clause introduced by ka'asher ("just as," H0834D) uses the same root '-s-ph ("to gather," H0622) in the niphal, but now in the plain perfect tense (ne'esaph), since Aaron's gathering is already a completed, past event relative to the moment of speaking. This repetition of the niphal form across both verbs (ne'esaphta / ne'esaph) creates a grammatical parallel between Moses' anticipated fate and Aaron's already-realized one, using identical verbal morphology to draw the two deaths into structural equivalence. The phrase gam-'attah ("also you," H1571+H0859A) reinforces this parallel by explicitly adding Moses to the category of those "gathered," matching Aaron.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the niphal ne'esaphta as ibis ("you will go"), an active verb, differing from the passive sense of the Hebrew niphal and from the LXX's προστεθήσῃ ("you will be added"), which preserves a passive form closer to the Hebrew construction. The LXX also adds the geographic specification "ἐν τῷ Ὥρ τῷ ὄρει" ("on Mount Hor"), a detail not present in the Hebrew text or the Vulgate as given here.