Numbers 34:2 — ‘The land that shall FALL to you’: the Hebrew for inheriting Canaan is a word about casting lots

⚠⚠ The land is not given here. It falls. The verb at v2 is tippol, the ordinary Hebrew word for falling, and it is odd enough that a reader is entitled to wonder whether the translation has slipped. It has not. This is the vocabulary of the goral, the lot: a marked token is thrown and it FALLS on someone, and eleven verses later v13 says the word outright — ‘the land that you shall inherit BY LOT’. The chapter opens with the verb and then explains it.

⚠ Nine of the thirteen versions on this project’s two shelves keep the falling, and four give it up. Keeping it: KJV and ASV alike, ‘shall fall unto you for an inheritance’; Geneva 1599, ‘shall fall unto your inheritance’; NWT 1984, ‘will fall to YOU by inheritance’, and its own 2013 revision, ‘will fall to you as an inheritance’; TNM 1987, «les caerá por herencia»; the RV antigua «os ha de caer en heredad»; and the RV60 «os ha de caer en herencia» — eight of the nine. The ninth keeps it and then does something more, which is the next paragraph. Giving it up: NIV, ‘the land that will be allotted to you’; NVI, «que van a recibir en heredad»; and the Living Bible, which rewrites the clause into the opposite direction of travel — ‘I am giving you the entire land as your homeland’. The TNM 2019 reads «recibirán como herencia».

⚠ Which puts the two revisions of one version on opposite sides. The English NWT still reads ‘will fall’ in 2013; the Spanish TNM drops «caerá» for «recibirán» in 2019. Same publisher, same verse, two different answers thirty-two years apart.

⚠⚠ And the Douay-Rheims alone says the quiet part out loud: ‘when you are entered into the land of Chanaan, and it shall be fallen into your possession BY LOT’. Working from the Vulgate, it puts the lot into v2 — eleven verses before the Hebrew does. It is the one version on the shelf that does not merely keep the verb but explains it.

‘According to its borders’ (li-gvuloteha) is the last phrase of v2 and the shape of everything down to v12. Gvul — border — is this chapter’s title-word in the plainest possible sense: searched consonantally across the whole Torah, it stands here sixteen times in twenty-nine verses, more than in any other chapter of the five books and nearly three times the runner-up (Numbers 21, with six). What follows is not a description of a country. It is a deed.

Numbers 34:3-5 — The Ascent of Scorpions, the hands of Edom, and a correction the Masoretes left in the margin at v4

South is negev — which is also the name of the desert that lies there. Hebrew does not have a neutral word for this direction; it points at the dry country and calls that the way. It is the first of three sides in this chapter named after the thing that sits in them (see the note on v6 for the sea, and the note on v15 for the front).

⚠ V3’s ‘close beside Edom’ is, in Hebrew, al-yedei Edom — ‘on the HANDS of Edom’. The idiom is dead and means simply ‘alongside’, which is why this translation does not print the hands: in English ‘the hands of Edom’ would read as Edom doing something, and the strangeness would point nowhere. The hand is worth knowing about anyway, because it is the first body part in a chapter that is about to grow a shoulder and a pair of eyes — see the note on v11.

⚠⚠ V4’s ‘Ascent of Scorpions’ is a name the shelf splits on, and it splits along a line worth seeing. Aqrab is a scorpion and ma’aleh aqrabbim is the scorpions’ climb — a steep road up out of the rift, usually placed south-west of the Dead Sea. Nine of the thirteen transliterate and the sting disappears into a proper noun: KJV ‘the ascent of Akrabbim’, ASV ‘the ascent of Akrabbim’, RV60 «la subida de Acrabim», and the Geneva going furthest of all with ‘Maaleh Akrabbim’, transliterating even the word for the ascent. ⚠⚠ Four translate it, and three of those four are the shelf’s most freely-rendering versions. The NIV and the Living Bible both print ‘Scorpion Pass’, and the NVI «la cuesta de los Escorpiones» — the three versions on these two shelves that exist to be read easily, all reaching for the same image. ⚠ The fourth is the Douay-Rheims, and it is there for a different reason: it renders the Vulgate closely, and the Vulgate had already translated the name — ascensum Scorpionis, ‘the ascent of the Scorpion’, singular where the Hebrew is plural. Not a free rendering, then, but a faithful rendering of a translation that was itself free. Judges 1:36, already on these pages, is where this translation settled the question the other way — printing ‘the Ascent of Scorpions’, beside ‘the Rock’ for Sela in the same verse — so Numbers 34 follows its own precedent rather than inventing a second policy for one pass.

⚠ And the two verses are doing opposite jobs at the same place. Here the Ascent of Scorpions is a corner of the land Israel is being GIVEN, fixed in a deed before anyone has set foot in it. In Judges 1:36 it is the last place named in a chapter about how much of that land Israel never took — a line marking how far the AMORITE’s territory reached. The same pass, in the deed and in the failure.

⚠⚠ A ketiv/qere sits in the middle of v4, and it is about as legible as they get. The Masorah preserves two forms of the same word at once: what is WRITTEN (ketiv) is ve-hayah, ‘and it shall be’, singular; what is READ aloud (qere) is ve-hayu, ‘and they shall be’, plural. The subject is totze’otav, ‘its goings-out’, which is plural — and the identical phrase ve-hayu totze’otav recurs three more times in this chapter, at vv5, 9 and 12, written plural every time. (V8 has the same construction with the noun spelled out instead of the suffix, ve-hayu totze’ot ha-gvul, ‘and the goings-out of the border shall be’ — plural too.) So v4 is the only place in the chapter the phrase is written singular, and the qere brings it into line with its own neighbours. This project prints the Masoretic Text, which means printing both and saying which is which rather than quietly choosing one.

The ‘Brook of Egypt’ (v5) is a wadi, not the Nile — nachal Mitzrayim, a seasonal watercourse that runs only after rain, generally identified with the Wadi el-Arish across northern Sinai. It is the south-western corner post, and the border reaches the Mediterranean there — which is why v5 ends at ‘the Sea’ and says nothing further: the Hebrew is ha-yamah, and in this chapter that one word does the work of a direction and a place at once. The note on v6 is where it comes apart.

⚠⚠ And it is spelled exactly like the word this chapter uses for an INHERITANCE. V5’s nachlah, the torrent-bed, and v2’s nachalah, the heritable landholding, are the same three letters — n-ch-l — and the lexicons list them as separate roots that happen to have fallen together. Searched consonantally, those letters stand eight times in this chapter: seven of them are the inheritance, and this one is a dry riverbed. ⚠ It is the first of three such coincidences here, and readers who like this sort of thing should know now that the other two are worse: see the verb at vv7-10, which is spelled like the verb for coveting, and the verb at v11, which is spelled like the verb for blotting out.

⚠ And the wilderness here is ZIN, not Sin. Numbers 33, already on these pages, is where this project set out the two similarly-spelled deserts — Hebrew Tzin and Sin, different letters for different places — and noted that the Douay-Rheims, following the Vulgate, prints Sin for both and so merges them for its readers. It does the same here: ‘the wilderness of Sin, which is by Edom’.

Numbers 34:6-9 — In Hebrew the west IS the sea; mount Hor is not Aaron’s mountain; and the verb for marking a border is spelled exactly like the verb for coveting

⚠⚠ V6 is the hardest verse in this chapter to carry into English at all, and this translation has tried anyway. The Hebrew word for ‘west’ is yam, which is also the Hebrew word for ‘sea’ — because the sea is what lies west of anyone standing in Canaan. So v6 in Hebrew says gvul yam, then names the Great Sea, then says gvul yam again: sea-border, sea, sea-border, three times in one short verse. Every version on both shelves prints ‘west’ and the collision vanishes. This one prints ‘sea border’ and lets the reader hear the verse arrive at the same word twice.

⚠ The middle of the verse is a real crux, and the shelf reads it four ways. After ‘the Great Sea’ the Hebrew has a loose u-gvul, ‘and a border’. As a SECOND THING: ASV ‘the great sea and the border thereof’, NWT 1984 ‘the Great Sea and the shoreland’, its 2013 revision ‘the Great Sea and the coast’, TNM 1987 «el mar Grande y la tierra litoral». As the PREDICATE: KJV ‘ye shall even have the great sea for a border’. As a GENITIVE: the TNM 2019 «la costa del mar Grande», and the NIV ‘the coast of the Mediterranean Sea’. The Douay-Rheims declines all three and writes its own sentence: ‘the west side shall begin from the great sea, and the same shall be the end thereof’.

⚠ The NIV, the Living Bible and the NVI all replace the Hebrew’s own names with modern ones here — the first two print ‘the Mediterranean Sea’ and the third «el mar Mediterráneo» for the Great Sea, and at v11 the NIV has ‘the Sea of Galilee’ and the NVI «el lago Quinéret» for Chinnereth. A reader always knows where they are and never learns what the text called it.

⚠⚠⚠ Mount Hor at vv7-8 is NOT the mountain where Aaron died. Numbers 20 and Numbers 33, both already on these pages, put Aaron’s Hor on the Edomite frontier in the far south, and Numbers 33:38 dates his death there to the day. This Hor is a landmark on the NORTHERN border, on a line drawn from the Mediterranean toward the approach to Hamath — the opposite end of the country. The Hebrew is letter for letter the same, Hor ha-Har, ‘Hor the mountain’. Searched consonantally, the phrase stands in thirteen verses of the Hebrew Bible: ten are Aaron’s mountain (Numbers 20:22, 23, 25, 27; 21:4; 33:37, 38, 39, 41; and Deuteronomy 32:50, not yet on these pages), two are these, and the thirteenth is not the name at all — Micah 7:12 (not yet on these pages) uses the same letters to mean ‘from mountain to mountain’.

⚠ The Douay-Rheims is the one version that never creates the problem, because it refuses the name. Following the Vulgate’s montem altissimum it prints ‘the borders shall begin from the great sea, reaching to THE MOST HIGH MOUNTAIN’ — reading hor as an ordinary word for a height rather than as a proper noun. Alone on the shelf, it has no second Mount Hor to explain.

⚠⚠⚠ And the verb for marking the line out is spelled exactly like the verb for coveting. Vv7 and 8 read te’ta’u, ‘you shall mark out’; v10 has the same root in a reflexive form, ve-hit’avvitem. Searched consonantally, te’ta’u stands in exactly six verses of the whole Hebrew Bible — these two, and four where the identical letters mean to CRAVE: Deuteronomy 5:17 (not yet on these pages), ‘you shall not desire your neighbour’s house’, and Proverbs 23:3, 23:6 and 24:1, all ‘do not crave’. V10’s own form is a true one-off; it stands nowhere else in the Bible at all.

⚠ The lexicons list two separate roots that happen to fall together, so this is homonymy and not a pun, and this note claims no more than the letters. But the letters are these: a Hebrew reader marking out the borders of a land Israel is about to take meets the same word that, in Deuteronomy’s retelling of the tenth commandment, forbids wanting your neighbour’s house and field. ⚠ That substitution is Deuteronomy’s and not Exodus’s — Exodus 20:13, already on these pages, uses lo tachmod for the house and for the wife alike, and it is Deuteronomy that changes the second verb.

Numbers 34:11 — The border strikes the SHOULDER of the sea of Galilee, in a verb that everywhere else means to blot out

⚠⚠⚠ V11’s verb is machah, and in its other three appearances it erases things. Searched consonantally, the exact form u-machah stands in four verses of the whole Hebrew Bible. Three of them wipe something out: Numbers 5:23, already on these pages, where the priest writes the curses in a scroll and BLOTS THEM OUT into the water of bitterness; Deuteronomy 29:19 (not yet on these pages), where Jehovah BLOTS OUT a man’s name from under heaven; and Isaiah 25:8 (not yet on these pages), where he WIPES AWAY tears from off all faces. The fourth is this one, where a boundary line reaches a lakeshore.

⚠ Two roots that fell together, again — not a pun, and not a quarrel with the shelf, which is unanimous and right. The NWT 1984 has ‘strike upon’ and its 2013 revision ‘cross’; the KJV and ASV alike ‘reach unto’; the TNM 1987 «dar con»; the RV60 «llegará a la costa». Every one of them takes the geographical sense without hesitating, and this translation follows them. The note is only that the letters a Hebrew reader meets, in the sentence where the land finally gets an edge, are the letters of erasure.

⚠⚠ What the border strikes is a ketef — a SHOULDER — and this translation is alone in saying so. The shelf reaches for slopes and sides. The NWT 1984 and its 2013 revision alike read ‘the eastern slope’; the TNM 1987 «la ladera oriental»; the KJV ‘the side of the sea’, and so, word for word, the ASV ‘the side of the sea’ and the Geneva ‘the side of the sea of Chinnereth’; the RV60 «llegará a la costa» and the RV antigua «la costa de la mar»; the NVI «la ribera»; and the NIV ‘the slopes east of the Sea of Galilee’. Every one of those is a fair rendering of what the phrase MEANS. None of them is what it says — and English already talks about the shoulder of a hill and the shoulder of a road, so the word costs a reader nothing.

⚠⚠⚠ It is worth the word because by v11 this land has a body. It has hands (v3, ‘on the hands of Edom’), it has a shoulder (v11), and its two north-eastern landmarks are EYES: Ain is ‘the spring’, which is the ordinary Hebrew word for an eye, and Hazar-enan at vv9-10 is the enclosure of springs — the courtyard of eyes. ⚠ Numbers 22, already on these pages, is where this project first kept an eye in the ground, against eleven of thirteen versions — ‘it has covered the EYE of the land’ — and observed there that the idiom is dead in Hebrew and the chapter reanimates it. Numbers 34 does the same thing at the scale of a whole map.

⚠ The Douay-Rheims turns the eye into a person. Where the Hebrew has only mi-qedem la-ayin, east of the spring, the Vulgate reads contra fontem Daphnim, and the Douay prints ‘over against THE FOUNTAIN OF DAPHNIS’ — identifying the spring with Daphne, the famous watered suburb of Antioch, an identification the Hebrew does not make and no other version on either shelf repeats. It is the strangest single line on the shelf in this chapter. It does at least keep the fountain, which is exactly what Ain means.

V12 closes the circuit where it opened. V3 began at the end of the Salt Sea; v12 comes back down the Jordan and ends at the Salt Sea, and the chapter signs off saviv, ‘round about’ — a line that returns to its own starting post. Genesis 14:3, already on these pages, is where that water is first named. ⚠ The Living Bible loses this whole leg, running vv11-12 together as ‘and then along the Jordan River, ending at the Dead Sea’: the sea of Chinnereth drops out of the paraphrase altogether.

Numbers 34:13-15 — Nine tribes are GIVEN their land; two and a half TOOK theirs — and which versions keep the difference

⚠⚠ Two verbs, two verses apart. V13 describes the land Jehovah commanded latet, ‘TO GIVE’, to the nine tribes and the half tribe. Vv14-15 say that Reuben, Gad and half Manasseh laqchu — ‘have TAKEN’ — their inheritance, and the chapter says it three times in two verses. The nine are given; the two and a half took.

⚠ Whether the text is passing a verdict is exactly the kind of question this project does not vote on. Laqach is an ordinary Hebrew verb and can be perfectly neutral — ‘receive’ is a fair English word for it. What is not in doubt is that the chapter reaches for a different verb for these tribes than for the other nine, in adjacent sentences, and then repeats it.

⚠⚠ And the shelf splits, in a way that cuts straight across both languages. Keeping the taking: the NWT 1984 reads ‘have already taken’, three times over, and its 2013 revision the same; the TNM 1987 «ya han tomado»; the RV60 «han tomado»; the RV antigua «han tomado» likewise. Flattening it into receiving: the KJV ‘have received their inheritance’, the ASV ‘have received’, the Geneva 1599 ‘have received their inheritance’, the Douay-Rheims ‘have received their portion’, the NIV ‘have received their inheritance’, the NVI «ya recibieron», and the TNM 2019 «ya han recibido». ⚠ So the two revisions of one version part company a second time in this chapter, and in opposite directions from v2: the English NWT keeps ‘taken’ in 2013, and the Spanish TNM gives it up in 2019.

⚠ The whole exchange behind that verb is Numbers 32, already on these pages, where Reuben and Gad ASKED for the east bank and Moses answered with the spy story before making them swear to cross over armed ahead of their brothers. Read against that chapter, ‘took’ is this summary’s one-word account of a negotiation that ran forty-two verses.

⚠⚠ V15 says ‘east’ twice, in two different words, and that is how Hebrew builds a compass. Qedmah mizrachah — rendered here ‘toward the front, toward the sunrising’. Qedem is what lies BEFORE you; mizrach is the place of RISING. Both mean east because directions are given from a body facing the sunrise, and that is why the other sides of this chapter’s map are named after whatever lies in them: negev at vv3-4, the dry country, is south; yam at vv5-6, the sea, is west. Of the four sides only north, tzafon, is not doing double duty in this chapter. ⚠ Joshua 1:4, already on these pages, closes the pair from the far end: there the same Great Sea is mevo ha-shemesh, ‘the going-in of the sun’. Sunrise on one edge of the land, sunset on the other — and the same word gvul, border, on both.

Numbers 34:16-29 — Ten tribal chieftains listed in map order, and three of them are missing the title the command had just required

Eleazar the priest is named before Joshua son of Nun (v17), and the order is not deference. This is a division by lot, and the lot is a priestly instrument — the procedure that lets God point. The man who will lead the conquest is named second to the man who will draw the tokens.

V18 doubles its own noun: ve-nasi echad nasi echad, ‘and one chieftain, one chieftain, from each tribe’. That is ordinary Hebrew for ‘one apiece’ — the repetition IS the grammar, the way a distributive is built — and it is kept here rather than smoothed, because smoothing it would delete the construction.

⚠⚠⚠ And then the roster does not do what v18 just said. Seven of the ten men are given the title: at vv22-28 Dan, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Issachar, Asher and Naphtali each supply a nasi, a chieftain. Three are given no title at all: at vv19-21 Caleb for Judah, Shemuel for Simeon and Elidad for Benjamin are named with their tribes and nothing else. The command required a chieftain from every tribe; the list supplies the word for seven of the ten, and they are the last seven. ⚠ The text offers no reason, and this translation invents none.

⚠ Nearly the whole shelf reproduces the gap without remark, in both languages — from v22 onward the NWT 1984 and its 2013 revision read ‘a chieftain’, the ASV ‘a prince’, the Geneva ‘the prince’, the KJV ‘the prince of the tribe’, the NIV ‘the leader’, the RV60 «el príncipe», the RV antigua «el príncipe» likewise, the NVI «jefe», and the TNM 1987 «un principal». ⚠ The Douay-Rheims very nearly levels it: it drops the title from nine of the ten and keeps it for exactly one — Issachar at v26, ‘Phaltiel the prince, the son of Ozan’. That one is genuinely among the seven the Hebrew titles, so the Douay never puts the word anywhere the Hebrew does not; it simply thins the seven down to one, while agreeing with the Hebrew that the first three get nothing at all.

⚠⚠ Caleb is the only man in this list a reader of this book already knows, and he is first. Numbers 13, already on these pages, is where he hushed the assembly and said the land could be taken — disputing none of the scouts’ facts, only their conclusion. Numbers 14 is where he and Joshua alone of that generation were excepted from the sentence and promised they would enter it. Forty years on, he is the man Judah sends to divide it — and he, Joshua and Moses are the only three people in this chapter who were also in those ones. ⚠ He is also one of the three who is never called a chieftain. ⚠ One NAME in the list is not new, though the man is: Numbers 3:30, already on these pages, makes an Elizaphan son of Uzziel the chieftain of the Kohathite clans — so a reader meets the name here for the second time, and both times attached to the very title this chapter withholds from three men. The Levite and the Zebulunite are unrelated; the Bible does not remark on it.

⚠⚠ The ten are listed, broadly, in the order they will sit on the map this chapter has just drawn. Judah, Simeon, Benjamin and Dan first — the south and the coastal plain, where Dan’s allotment first lay before the tribe migrated north; then the two halves of Joseph in the centre; then Zebulun, Issachar, Asher and Naphtali in the north. This is neither birth order nor the marching order of Numbers 2. ⚠ ‘Broadly’ is doing real work in that sentence and the exceptions are worth naming: Manasseh is listed before Ephraim although Ephraim’s territory lies to the SOUTH of Manasseh’s, and the two are held together under one heading, ‘the children of Joseph’ (v23) — a family principle overriding the geographical one for exactly one entry. The allotments themselves are given in Joshua 15-19, not yet on these pages.

V29 ends on the root the chapter opened with. Le-nachel, ‘to give as an inheritance’, is built on the same three letters as v2’s nachalah — and those letters carry the inheritance seven times across the chapter (vv2, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 29), in a noun, a reflexive, two plain verbs and two infinitives of different stems. The land falls, is inherited by lot, is taken, is possessed, is apportioned. It is the same root every time — and an eighth appearance of it, at v5, is not the same word at all but a dry riverbed.