Numbers 35:30

Summary

The verse sets out a legal principle from the case laws on manslaughter and murder in Numbers 35: a person who has killed another may be put to death, but only on the testimony of witnesses (plural), and the second clause specifies that a single witness's testimony is not sufficient to condemn someone to death.

Key words

• Makeh ("[one who] strikes down", H5221) — hiphil participle, construct form; the causative stem marks the subject as the agent who causes death by striking, distinct from the noun-participle rotzeach later in the verse.
• Nefesh ("a person"/"anyone", H5315J) — appears twice (lines 3 and 17), literally "soul/life," used as the object of the killing and later of the testimony.
• le-fi ("to/according to the mouth of", H6310I) — construct form of "mouth," forming the idiom "by the mouth of witnesses," i.e., on the basis of their spoken testimony.
• yirtzach ("someone will kill", H7523) — qal imperfect, third-person, from the same root as rotzeach ("killer") later in the clause; the repetition of the root within one clause is a grammatical feature of the Hebrew not reproduced by an English gloss.
• ya'aneh ("he will testify", H6030B) — qal imperfect; here used with the preposition be- ("against") plus nefesh, meaning "answer/testify against a person," governing the negated clause about a single witness.

What the text says

The Hebrew opens with kol ("any," H3605) in construct with the participle Makeh ("striker of," H5221), forming the phrase "any striker of a nefesh" — a general legal subject, "anyone who strikes a person." The main clause states that such a person yirtzach ("will be killed" / "someone will kill," H7523, qal imperfect) et ha-rotzeach ("the killer," H7523, qal participle with definite article). Both yirtzach and ha-rotzeach derive from the same root (רצח), so the Hebrew clause contains an internal repetition — "he shall kill the killer" — that ties the punishment word directly to the descriptive noun for the offender. The imperfect verb form does not specify a grammatical subject beyond "someone," giving the clause an impersonal, legal-code tone rather than naming an executioner.

The second half of the verse is introduced by ve- ("and") plus ed echad ("one witness," H5707 + H0259, using the cardinal number "one" in feminine singular agreement). The negation lo' ("not," H3808) governs ya'aneh ("he will testify," H6030B, qal imperfect), followed by be-nefesh ("against a person," using the preposition be-, H9003) and the infinitive la-mut ("to die," H4191). The infinitive construction la-mut expresses purpose or result — testimony "for dying," i.e., testimony whose outcome would be a death sentence — and the single witness is grammatically barred from producing that outcome alone.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yirtzach (third-person qal imperfect, "someone will kill") as φονεύσεις, a second-person singular future ("you shall kill"), shifting the grammatical person of the command. The Vulgate uses a passive construction, "punietur" ("shall be punished"), diverging from the Hebrew's active verb form built on the root רצח repeated within the clause.