Numbers 31:24

Summary

Numbers 31:24 instructs that on the seventh day the addressees must wash their clothes, after which they become pure, and only then may they enter the camp. The verse presents three actions in a fixed temporal sequence: washing, purification, and re-entry.

Key words

• khibbastem ("you will wash", H3526H) — piel stem intensifies the washing action; sequential perfect form ties it directly to preceding instructions in the narrative chain.
• bigdeikhem ("your clothes", H0899B + H9026) — construct plural noun with 2nd person masculine plural suffix, specifying whose garments are washed.
• shevi'i ("seventh", H7637) — ordinal number marking the specific day on which the washing occurs.
• tehartem ("you will be pure", H2891) — qal sequential perfect; a simple (non-intensive) stem describing the resulting state after washing.
• tavo'u ("you will come", H0935G) — qal imperfect, marking this action as following (temporally and grammatically) the two prior perfect-tense actions.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a chain of three verbs connected by the narrative vav (וְ): khibbastem ("you will wash"), tehartem ("you will be pure"), and tavo'u ("you will come"). The first two verbs are sequential perfects, a verbal form that continues a chain of instructions or narrated actions already in progress from context outside this verse. The shift to tavo'u, an imperfect, marks the final action as a distinct step following the completion of the first two — reinforced by the temporal marker 'achar ("after", H0310A), which explicitly separates purification from the return to camp.

The construct phrase bigdei-khem ("clothes-of-you") ties the washing action to a specific object (the addressees' garments), while the ordinal ha-shevi'i ("the seventh") fixes the timing within the day-count of the passage. The two-stage sequence — wash, then become pure — grammatically distinguishes the physical act (piel kibbes) from the resulting state (qal taher), a distinction the Hebrew verbal stems mark morphologically but which does not always surface as separate concepts in translation.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate collapses the two Hebrew actions (tehartem, "you will be pure") into a participial phrase, "purificati... intrabitis" ("having been purified, you will enter"), merging what the Hebrew presents as two sequential finite verbs into one subordinate clause plus a main verb. The Septuagint (Swete text as given) renders the sequence with πλυνεῖσθε ("you will wash") and καθαρισθήσεσθε ("you will be purified") as two future passive verbs, paralleling the Hebrew's two-step structure, though the final clause in the provided Greek text appears to lack an explicit verb corresponding to tavo'u ("you will come"), showing only "τὴν παρεμβολήν" ("the camp") without a stated verb of motion in this rendering.