Numbers 9:6

Summary

The verse reports that some men were ritually unclean because of contact with a human corpse, which made them unable to perform the Passover offering on the appointed day. It states that they came before Moses and Aaron on that same day to raise the issue.

Key words

• va-yehi ("and it was", H1961) — narrative wayyiqtol form; here it introduces a new circumstance ("there were men"), not a simple past-tense statement.
• nefesh ("corpse of", H5315M) — feminine singular noun in construct state; combined with adam, it denotes the body of a dead human, the source of the impurity.
• le-'asot ("to observe", H6213A) — infinitive construct with prefixed preposition le, expressing purpose/capacity: "to do/perform" the Passover.
• va-yyiqrevu ("and they drew near", H7126G) — narrative wayyiqtol, plural masculine; marks the men's approach as the next event in the sequence.
• penei ("before", H6440G) — masculine plural construct of "face," forming the idiom "before the face of," used twice (before Moses, before Aaron).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two narrative verbs joined by va-chains: va-yehi ("and it was/there were") followed later by va-yyiqrevu ("and they drew near"). The first verb does not simply mean "it happened" in a temporal sense but functions to introduce a new group of people into the narrative — "there were men who...". The relative clause asher hayu tme'im ("who were unclean") uses a second qal perfect, hayu, marking a state completed before the main narrative moment, distinguishing their prior condition from the current problem.

The phrase le-nefesh adam is a construct chain: nefesh ("corpse," literally "soul/life" but idiomatically "corpse" when governing a dead body) plus adam ("a person"), giving "because of a human corpse." The impossibility of action is expressed through lo yakhelu la'asot — negation plus qal perfect "they were able" plus infinitive construct "to do/observe" — a standard Hebrew construction for expressing incapacity to perform an action, here the Passover (ha-pesach).

The repetition of ba-yom ha-hu ("on that day") at both the start and end of the verse, and the double use of li-fnei ("before the face of") for Moses and then separately for Aaron, gives the verse a symmetrical, formulaic structure typical of legal-narrative reporting in this section of Numbers.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va-yehi anashim ("and there were men") as παρεγένοντο οἱ ἄνδρες ("the men arrived/came"), turning the existential opening into a motion verb, which anticipates the later va-yyiqrevu ("they drew near"), rendered separately as προσῆλθον ("they approached"). The Vulgate opens with "Ecce autem quidam immundi" ("Behold, however, certain unclean ones"), adding the presentative "Ecce," which has no direct counterpart among the Hebrew words listed. Both the LXX (ἐπὶ ψυχῇ ἀνθρώπου) and the Vulgate (super anima hominis) preserve the "soul/corpse of a man" wording found in nefesh adam.