Numbers 31:7

Summary

This verse reports that the Israelites waged war against Midian in accordance with a divine command previously given to Moses, and that the outcome was the killing of every male among the Midianites.

Key words

• yitzbe'u ("they waged war", H6633) — qal narrative form, marking a sequential action ("and then they waged war"); the root relates to military campaigning.
• ka'asher ("as", H0834D) — relative particle combined with the preposition ka ("just", H9004), forming a comparative clause that ties the action to a prior standard ("just as...").
• tzivvah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, an intensive verb stem indicating a formal, authoritative act of command, completed before the main narrative action.
• YHWH ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name, subject of the command clause.
• yaharegu ("they killed", H2026) — qal narrative form, sequential to the waging of war, marking the resulting action.
• zakhar ("male", H2145) — masculine singular adjective functioning as a collective noun under kol ("every", H3605), specifying the totality of the group killed.

What the text says

The verse is built as two narrative clauses joined by the va- narrative sequence marker (H9001), a typical structure in Biblical Hebrew for sequential storytelling: first yitzbe'u ("they waged war") against Midian, then yaharegu ("they killed") every male. Between these two main verbs, a subordinate clause introduced by ka'asher ("as") interrupts the sequence to specify that the war was conducted "as Yehovah had commanded Moses." This subordinate clause uses the piel perfect tzivvah ("he had commanded"), which grammatically precedes the main narrative timeline — the command had already been given before the war began, and the perfect aspect marks it as a completed prior event rather than part of the ongoing narrative chain.

The object of the killing, kol-zakhar ("every male"), uses the singular noun zakhar under the quantifier kol, a common Hebrew construction for expressing totality with a distributive singular rather than a plural form. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before Mosheh ("Moses") signals that Moses is the recipient of the command, not its agent — the agent of tzivvah is YHWH.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) adds "atque vicissent" ("and had conquered/prevailed"), an interpretive expansion not present in the Hebrew or the LXX, which both move directly from waging war to the command clause without noting victory explicitly. The LXX renders yitzbe'u with paretaxanto ("they arrayed themselves in battle"), a term emphasizing formal battle deployment, where the Hebrew verb more broadly denotes waging military campaign.