Numbers 32:42

Summary

The verse reports that a man named Novach went, captured the town of Qenat and its dependent settlements, and renamed the place after himself. It closes a list of Transjordanian conquests attributed to individual leaders of the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh.

Key words

• Noach ("Nobah", H5025G) — proper name; placed at the very start of the clause before the verb, giving prominence to the subject before the narration of his action.
• ha.Lakh ("he went", H1980G) — qal perfect, a completed action reporting the initial movement, distinct from the following narrative verbs.
• i.yil.Kod ("he captured", H3920) — qal narrative (wayyiqtol) form; the vav-consecutive chains this action directly onto the preceding one, marking sequence: "and then he captured."
• be.no.Tei.ha ("her daughters", H1323H) — feminine plural construct with 3rd person feminine singular suffix, referring back to Qenat; the construct form ties the "daughters" grammatically to the town, an idiom used in Hebrew for smaller dependent settlements.
• sh.M.o ("his name", H8034) — masculine singular construct with 3rd person masculine suffix, used with the preposition bi ("by") to form the phrase "by his own name," completing the naming formula.

What the text says

The clause opens with the subject Noach placed before the verb halakh, a word order that foregrounds the agent rather than the action, a structure sometimes used in Hebrew narrative to shift focus onto a new character after a preceding list. The subsequent verbs, yilkod ("he captured") and yiqra' ("he called"), are narrative (wayyiqtol) forms that chain sequentially from the initial statement, presenting the capture and the renaming as a continuous, connected sequence of events rather than isolated facts.

The phrase benoteiha ("her daughters") is a construct expression attached to Qenat, using the feminine plural noun for "daughters" to denote surrounding or dependent settlements rather than literal offspring. The final clause, va-yiqra lah Noach bi-shemo ("and he called it, Nobah, by his own name"), repeats the name Noach redundantly alongside the pronoun "it" (lah), reinforcing that the naming act specifically replaced the town's identity with the conqueror's own name.

Differences between versions

The LXX gives the captured town's name as Καάθ (Kaath), differing from the Hebrew Qenat ("Kenath"); it also spells the renaming result as Νάβωθ (Nabōth) rather than matching the initial Νάβαυ (Nabau) used for the subject's name. The Vulgate renders benoteiha ("her daughters") as viculis suis ("its little villages"), and the LXX similarly as τὰς κώμας αὐτῆς ("her villages"), both interpreting the Hebrew idiom of "daughters" as smaller settlements rather than translating it literally.