Numbers 30:1

Summary

The verse introduces a speech: Moses addresses the heads of the tribes of the sons of Israel, announcing that what follows is a word commanded by Yehovah. It functions as an introductory formula before the legal content that follows in the chapter.

Key words

• y.da.Ber ("he spoke", H1696G) — Piel narrative verb, marking the intensive/factitive nuance of formal speech and continuing the narrative sequence ("and then he spoke").
• ra.Shei ("[the] leaders of", H7218H) — masculine plural construct noun, grammatically bound to ha-ma.Tot ("the tribes"), forming the phrase "heads of the tribes."
• le.Mor ("saying", H0559) — Qal infinitive introduced by the preposition le, functioning as a quotation marker that opens direct speech.
• tzi.Vah ("he has commanded", H6680) — Piel perfect, indicating a completed act of command, with Yehovah as subject.
• ha.da.Var ("[is] the word", H1697G with article H9009) — definite noun, the subject-complement of the demonstrative zeh ("this", H2088), forming the formula "this is the word."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with the narrative verb va-y.da.Ber ("and he spoke"), a Piel form that in this construction denotes formal or official speech rather than casual talk. Moses is the subject, and the addressees are introduced through a double construct chain: ra.Shei ha-ma.Tot li-v.Nei Yis.ra.'El — literally "heads of the tribes of/for the sons of Israel." The construct chain stacks two relationships: the "heads" belong to "the tribes," and the tribes belong to "the sons of Israel," producing a layered genitive structure that Hebrew handles without additional prepositions beyond the initial li.

The infinitive le.Mor ("saying") serves as the standard hinge introducing direct discourse, after which the demonstrative construction zeh ha-da.Var ("this [is] the word") functions as a nominal sentence — Hebrew lacks a copula "is," so the juncture between zeh and ha-da.Var supplies the equivalence "this is the word." The relative clause 'a.sher tzi.Vah Yah.weh ("which Yehovah has commanded") uses a Piel perfect verb, marking the command as a completed, authoritative act attributed directly to Yehovah, with no explicit object stated in the Hebrew at this point — the content of the command is deferred to what follows in the text.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) omits the phrase "heads of the tribes" entirely, addressing the speech directly τοῖς υἱοῖς Ἰσραήλ ("to the sons of Israel"), and restructures the second clause as κατὰ πάντα ὅσα ἐνετείλατο Κύριος τῷ Μωυσῇ ("according to all that the Lord commanded Moses"), which reports the command in the third person rather than presenting Moses' direct speech (as marked by le.Mor and zeh in the Hebrew). The Vulgate follows this same pattern: Narravitque Moyses filiis Israël omnia quæ ei Dominus imperarat ("Moses told the sons of Israel all that the Lord had commanded him"), likewise dropping "heads of the tribes" and converting the direct quotation formula into indirect narration.