Numbers 5:16

Summary

The verse describes two consecutive actions performed by the priest on the woman: bringing her near and making her stand before Yehovah. Both verbs are causative forms, indicating the priest actively initiates her movement and positioning.

Key words

• hikRiv ("he will bring near", H7126G) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect: the priest causes the woman to approach, rather than she approaching on her own.
• 'oTah ("her", H0853+H9034) — direct object marker with pronominal suffix, marking the woman as the one being acted upon.
• he'emiDah ("he will make stand", H5975G) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, parallel in form to hikRiv: again the priest is the causative agent, this time causing her to stand.
• fNei ("before", H6440G) — construct plural noun literally "face of," forming the phrase "before the face of," here governing Yehovah.
• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name, object of the preposition "before."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as two coordinated clauses joined by the narrative ve ("and", H9001), each headed by a hiphil verb in sequential perfect form. This grammatical pairing — hikRiv ("he will bring near") followed by he'emiDah ("he will make stand") — creates a parallel structure where the priest is the sole grammatical subject acting upon the woman through both verbs. The repetition of the causative (hiphil) stem underscores that the woman's positioning is entirely the priest's doing: the text does not present her as moving herself but as being moved and placed.

The direct object marker 'oTah ("her", H0853+H9034) appears identically after each verb (once spelled with a suffix directly, note position 3-4, and implied again in position 9 as part of he'emiDah), reinforcing that she is the object of both actions in sequence. The final phrase lifNei Yehovah ("before Yehovah") uses the construct noun fNei ("face of", H6440G), a common Hebrew idiom for "in the presence of," placing the entire scene in a specified location relative to the divine name Yehovah (H3068G).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew repeats the object pronoun "her" after each verb ('oTah...he'emiDah + her), a structure the LXX preserves with αὐτὴν ("her") after each Greek verb (προσάξει, στήσει). The Vulgate, however, uses eam ("her") only once, after the first verb (offeret... eam), and does not repeat the pronoun with the second verb statuet ("he will make stand"), slightly compressing the parallel repetition visible in the Hebrew and Greek.