Numbers 5:6

Summary

The verse opens the legal instruction on restitution for wrongdoing: Yehovah commands Moses to tell the Israelites that when a man or a woman commits any of the sins that humans commit, acting unfaithfully against Yehovah, that person becomes guilty. The sentence is a conditional legal formula establishing the case ("if... then guilt results").

Key words

• daBer ("speak", H1696G) — piel imperative, giving the verse its function as a direct divine command to Moses to transmit legislation.
• ki ("if", H3588A) — conditional particle that opens the legal case; everything from here to ba-Yehovah describes the condition triggering guilt.
• ya'aSu ("they will do", H6213H) — qal imperfect, plural in form even though its subject ('ish 'o 'ishah, "a man or a woman") is singular; Hebrew treats the disjunctive pair as a collective plural.
• lime'ol ("acting unfaithfully", H4603) + Ma'al ("unfaithfulness", H4604) — infinitive construct followed by its cognate noun, an emphatic construction repeating the same root to intensify the verbal idea, roughly "to commit an act of unfaithfulness."
• 'asheMah ("it will be guilty", H0816) — qal sequential perfect (vav + perfect), marking the narrative consequence that follows automatically once the condition in ki is fulfilled.

What the text says

The verse is built as a single conditional-consequential clause. The protasis begins with 'ish ("a man", H0376G) 'o ("or", H0176A) 'ishah ("a woman", H0802G), joined to the conditional ki, and continues with the plural verb ya'aSu, describing "any of the sins of humankind" (mikkol chattot ha-'adam, a construct chain: "from-all sins-of the-humankind"). This general category is narrowed by the infinitive-plus-cognate-noun phrase lime'ol Ma'al, "to act unfaithfully [with] unfaithfulness," directed ba-Yehovah ("against Yehovah", H3068G). The apodosis, introduced by the vav-sequential perfect 'asheMah, states the legal result: "the person, that one" (ha-Nefesh ha-Hiv') — a feminine singular noun with demonstrative pronoun — becomes guilty. The grammatical mismatch between the compound singular subject and the plural verb ya'aSu is a feature of Hebrew syntax when subjects are joined by "or," while the doubled root of lime'ol Ma'al intensifies the verbal action beyond what a single verb form would convey.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the cognate infinitive construction with a doubled participle-plus-verb structure (παριδὼν παρίδῃ, πλημμελῶν πλημμελήσῃ), amplifying the repetition differently than the Hebrew infinitive-plus-noun pattern. The Vulgate adds mandatum Domini ("the command of the Lord"), an object not present in the Hebrew clause, and glosses Ma'al as per negligentiam ("through negligence"), a specific interpretive choice not inherent in the root H4604. The BSB restructures the sentence, placing "against the LORD" with "acts unfaithfully" and adding "against another," a phrase not present in the Hebrew wording of this verse.