Numbers 32:6

Summary

Moses addresses the descendants of Gad and Reuben with a rhetorical question, contrasting their brothers who will go to battle with themselves who would remain behind. The sentence structure in Hebrew emphasizes this contrast through pronoun placement and word order.

Key words

• ha ("¿", H9008) — interrogative particle prefixed to achei, marking the entire sentence as a question rather than a statement; Hebrew has no separate question word like "shall" but signals interrogation morphologically at the start of the clause.
• achei ("brothers", H0251I) — masculine plural construct of "brothers," bound to the suffix khem ("your," H9026), forming "your brothers" (achei-khem); this construct chain places the possessed noun before the possessor marker.
• yavo'u ("will they go", H0935G) — qal imperfect, third person masculine plural, expressing future or ongoing action of "your brothers," the subject of the first clause.
• atem ("you", H0859D) — independent personal pronoun, second person masculine plural, placed explicitly before the verb teshvu; since Hebrew verbs already encode person, this separate pronoun adds emphasis, highlighting the subject "you" in contrast to "your brothers."
• teshvu ("will you remain?", H3427) — qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, parallel in form to yavo'u, creating a grammatical mirror between the two clauses.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative verb va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) introducing Moses as speaker, followed by two prepositional phrases marking the addressees: li-vnei-Gad ("to the descendants of Gad") and ve-li-vnei-Reuven ("and to the descendants of Reuben"), each using the construct form bnei ("descendants of", H1121G) linking to the tribal names.

The core of the verse is a single question spanning two parallel clauses, joined by ve ("and", H9002). The first clause, ha-acheikhem yavo'u la-milchamah ("shall your brothers go to the battle"), places the interrogative particle ha at the very front, governing the whole compound question. The second clause, ve-atem teshvu poh ("and you will remain here"), uses the explicit pronoun atem even though the verb teshvu already marks second person plural — this redundancy in Hebrew grammar functions as contrastive emphasis, setting "you" against "your brothers" from the first clause. The two verbs yavo'u and teshvu are both qal imperfect and grammatically parallel, reinforcing the structural symmetry between "they will go" and "you will remain."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text names the addressees directly (li-vnei-Gad ve-li-vnei-Reuven, "to the descendants of Gad and to the descendants of Reuben"), and the LXX follows this with τοῖς υἱοῖς Γὰδ καὶ τοῖς υἱοῖς Ῥουβήν. The Vulgate, however, replaces the tribal names with the pronoun "Quibus" ("to whom"), relying on the preceding narrative context rather than repeating the names explicitly.