Numbers 32:28

Summary

Moses issues a command concerning the Gadites and Reubenites (the group discussed in the preceding verses) and directs it to three parties: Eleazar the priest, Joshua son of Nun, and the heads of the ancestral houses of the tribes of Israel. The verse names the officials responsible for enforcing the arrangement just agreed upon.

Key words

• y.Tzav ("he commanded", H6680) — piel stem, narrative form; the piel here intensifies the act of commanding, framing Moses as issuing an authoritative directive rather than a simple request.
• la.Hem ("of/to them", H9005+H9038) — preposition with 3rd person plural suffix; identifies the beneficiaries or subject-matter of the command, referring back to the tribes discussed earlier in the chapter.
• bin- ("son of", H1121A) — construct form of "son", linking Yehoshua to Nun without a separate word for "of".
• ra.Shei ("heads of", H7218H) and 'a.Vot ("fathers of", H0001G) — two stacked construct forms; each noun is grammatically bound to the next, producing a chain "heads-of fathers-of the-tribes."
• 'et (H0853, three occurrences) — the direct object marker, untranslated but marking each named recipient (Eleazar, Joshua, the heads) as the object of the verbal action.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative verb va-y.Tzav ("and he commanded"), followed by the subject Moshe placed after the verb — a verb-subject order typical of Hebrew narrative sequencing. Before the subject appears, the phrase la.Hem ("concerning/to them") is attached directly to the verb, indicating that the command pertains to a group already established in the surrounding narrative (the Gadites and Reubenites), even though that group is not named again in this verse.

The three recipients of the command — Eleazar, Joshua, and the tribal heads — are each introduced by the direct object marker 'et, showing they are grammatically the objects toward whom Moses directs the command, not the ones the command is about. The final phrase builds a triple construct chain: ra.Shei ("heads of") governs 'a.Vot ("fathers of"), which governs ha.matot ("the tribes"), which is further specified by li-vnei Yisrael ("of the people of Israel"). This nested construct structure compresses what in English requires multiple prepositional phrases ("the heads of the fathers of the tribes of the people of Israel") into a single unbroken Hebrew noun sequence.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate adds a clause not present in the Hebrew or the Greek: et dixit ad eos ("and he said to them"), extending Moses' action beyond commanding into direct speech, whereas the Hebrew and LXX end the verse with the list of recipients. The LXX renders the initial verb with synestēsen ("he set/appointed" or "he charged"), a different verbal nuance than the Hebrew y.Tzav ("he commanded"), while the Vulgate's praecepit ("he commanded") aligns more closely with the Hebrew verb. The Spanish RV1909 renders la.Hem as "los encomendó" ("he entrusted them"), construing the pronoun as the object of a verb of entrusting rather than as a prepositional phrase attached to a command verb, which shifts the grammatical relationship shown in the Hebrew.