Numbers 3:14

Summary

The verse reports that Yehovah spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, introducing a divine speech that follows. It is a standard narrative formula marking the transition to new legal or ceremonial instructions.

Key words

• va-yedaber ("and he spoke", H1696G) — piel verb with narrative vav, indicating a sequential past action ("and then he spoke"); the piel stem gives intensive or formal weight to the act of speaking, common in introducing divine commands.
• YHWH ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the proper divine name, functioning as the subject of the verb.
• midbar ("wilderness of", H4057B) — masculine singular noun in construct state, meaning it must be joined to the following word ("wilderness of X"), here forming "wilderness of Sinai."
• Sinai (H5514H) — proper place name, completing the construct phrase begun by midbar.
• le-mor ("saying", H0559) — qal infinitive with prefixed preposition le, a fixed formula meaning "in saying" or "as follows," used to introduce direct discourse.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative construction va-yedaber, a piel verb form with the narrative vav attached, which signals a new sequential event in the story: "and he spoke." The subject YHWH follows directly, and the preposition 'el ("to", H0413) introduces the recipient, Mosheh ("Moses", H4872). This subject-verb-object order is typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative syntax reporting divine speech.

The phrase be-midbar Sinai uses the preposition be ("in", H9003) attached to the construct noun midbar ("wilderness of"), which grammatically requires a following noun to complete its meaning — here Sinai. This construct chain functions as a single locative unit, "in the wilderness of Sinai," specifying where the speech occurred.

The verse closes with le-mor, an infinitive construct with the preposition le ("to", H9005) prefixed to the root 'amar ("to say", H0559). This is the standard Hebrew formula for introducing direct speech, functioning much like an English colon before a quotation. The infinitive form itself carries no tense; its meaning ("saying," "as follows") is determined by its syntactic position at the end of the introductory clause, immediately preceding the content of the divine speech that follows in subsequent verses.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew construct phrase midbar Sinai ("wilderness of Sinai") is rendered by the LXX as en tē erēmō Seina ("in the wilderness, Sinai"), using an appositional rather than construct structure. The Vulgate's in deserto Sinai mirrors the Hebrew construct sense closely, as does the Spanish RV1909 and SBLIBRE ("el desierto de Sinaí") and the English BSB ("the Wilderness of Sinai").