Numbers 35:32

Summary

The verse prohibits accepting a ransom payment on behalf of someone who has fled to a city of refuge, which would allow him to return home before the appointed time. The text specifies that such a person may not resume dwelling in his own land until the death of "the priest."

Key words

• tikchu ("you will take", H3947) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural: a plural prohibition addressed to the community, negated by lo ("not", H3808), forbidding a collective action.
• kofer ("a ransom", H3724A) — masculine singular noun denoting a payment or substitute price, the object that must not be taken.
• ir miklato ("city of his refuge", H5892B + H4733 + H9023) — a construct chain ("city of refuge") with a possessive suffix "his," specifying the particular refuge city to which the individual fled.
• lashuv ("to return", H7725G) — qal infinitive, expressing purpose or result: the returning that the ransom would enable.
• ad-mot hakohen ("until the death of the priest", H5704 + H4194 + H3548) — construct phrase marking the temporal boundary of the restriction; mot is a construct noun meaning "death of," bound to hakohen ("the priest").

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a chain of three infinitives — lanus ("to flee", H5127), lashuv ("to return", H7725G), and lashevet ("to dwell", H3427) — each governed by the preposition le- ("to", H9005). This creates a sequence of purpose clauses: the ransom in question would be for the purpose of fleeing, so that the person might return, so that he might dwell in the land. The construct chain ir miklato ("city of his refuge") ties the location tightly to the individual through the pronominal suffix, marking it as his designated place of asylum rather than a generic city.

The temporal clause ad-mot hakohen ("until the death of the priest") sets a fixed boundary using the construct noun mot ("death of", H4194), which is grammatically bound to hakohen ("the priest", H3548). The article on hakohen points to a specific, previously identified priest rather than priests in general.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text reads simply hakohen ("the priest", H3548) without further qualification. The Septuagint renders this as ὁ ἱερεὺς ὁ μέγας ("the great priest"), and the Vulgate uses pontificis ("of the high priest/pontiff"), both adding a qualifier of rank not present in the Hebrew construct phrase itself. The BSB translation follows this same expanded rendering ("high priest"), while the Hebrew word-by-word data shows only ha-kohen, "the priest."