Numbers 32:21

Summary

The verse continues the conditional promise Moses makes to the Gadites and Reubenites: every armed man among them will cross the Jordan "before Yehovah" and continue in that position until the dispossession of the enemies is complete. It describes military engagement tied to the presence of Yehovah rather than merely a river crossing.

Key words

• 'a.Var ("he will pass over", H5674A) — qal sequential perfect; continues the sequence of conditions Moses laid out, functioning as a future/consequential action ("[then] he will cross").
• chaLutz ("equipped [man]", H2502B) — qal passive participle, singular but functioning collectively with kol ("every") to describe the state of being armed/prepared, not a specific individual.
• liFnei ("before", H6440G) — construct plural noun with preposition, literally "to the faces of," used spatially/relationally to mark the crossing as happening in Yehovah's presence.
• horiSh ("has dispossessed", H3423H) — hiphil infinitive (causative stem) with pronominal suffix "his/him"; expresses a causative action ("to cause to be dispossessed") whose grammatical subject is only indicated by the attached suffix, not a separate noun.
• 'oyeVav ("his enemies", H0341) — qal participle in construct form, literally "the ones being hostile," functioning as a noun for "enemies" with a possessive suffix.

What the text says

The clause opens with a vav-continuative verb, 'aVar, tying this verse to the preceding conditional statement. The subject is kol-chaLutz ("every equipped [man]"), a collective singular construction referring to all armed men of the tribes, who will cross et-haYarden ("the Jordan", H3383) — the direct object marked by 'et. The phrase liFnei Yehovah ("before Yehovah") specifies that this crossing occurs in Yehovah's presence, using the construct noun paNim ("face/presence") governed by the preposition le-.

The temporal clause 'ad horiSho ("until his dispossessing," H3423H) uses an infinitive with a suffixed pronoun "his," leaving the grammatical subject of the dispossessing act implicit. The following phrase, 'et-'oyeVav mipaNav ("his enemies from before him," H0341 + H6440G), likewise carries suffixes ("his," "him") without an explicit antecedent noun in this verse alone, so the referents for "his enemies" and "before him" depend on context outside the verse's own wording.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew leaves the subject of horiSho ("his dispossessing") grammatically implicit, marked only by a pronominal suffix. The Vulgate resolves this ambiguity explicitly by naming Dominus ("the Lord") as the subject: "donec subvertat Dominus inimicos suos" ("until the Lord subverts his enemies"). The LXX renders the clause differently in structure, making "the enemy" (ὁ ἐχθρὸς) the grammatical subject of a passive verb, ἐκτριβῇ ("is destroyed"), rather than an object being "dispossessed," shifting the syntactic role of "enemy" from object (as in the Hebrew 'et-'oyeVav) to subject.