Numbers 5:21

5:21 Then the priest will put the woman under the oath of the curse ¹  and will say ²  to the her, “The Lord make you an attested curse ³  among your people, ⁴  if the Lord makes ⁵  your thigh fall away ⁶  and your abdomen swell; ⁷ 

Numbers 8:16

8:16 For they are entirely given ⁸  to me from among the Israelites. I have taken them for myself instead of ⁹  all who open the womb, the firstborn sons of all the Israelites.

Numbers 8:19

8:19 I have given the Levites as a gift to Aaron and his sons from among the Israelites, to do the work for the Israelites in the tent of meeting, and to make atonement for the Israelites, so there will be no plague among the Israelites when the Israelites come near the sanctuary.” ¹⁰ 

Numbers 9:7

9:7 And those men said to him, “We are ceremonially defiled by the dead body of a man; why are we kept back from offering the Lord’s offering at its appointed time among the Israelites?”

Numbers 13:32

13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ¹¹  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ¹²  to investigate is a land that devours ¹³  its inhabitants. ¹⁴  All the people we saw there ¹⁵  are of great stature.

Numbers 16:3

16:3 And they assembled against Moses and Aaron, saying to them, “You take too much upon yourselves, ¹⁶  seeing that the whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the community of the Lord?”

Numbers 16:47

16:47 So Aaron did ¹⁷  as Moses commanded ¹⁸  and ran into the middle of the assembly, where the plague was just beginning among the people. So he placed incense on the coals and made atonement for the people.

Numbers 17:6

17:6 So Moses spoke to the Israelites, and each of their leaders gave him a staff, one for each leader, ¹⁹  according to their tribes ²⁰  – twelve staffs; the staff of Aaron was among their staffs.

Numbers 18:23-24

18:23 But the Levites must perform the service ²¹  of the tent of meeting, and they must bear their iniquity. ²²  It will be a perpetual ordinance throughout your generations that among the Israelites the Levites ²³  have no inheritance. ²⁴  18:24 But I have given ²⁵  to the Levites for an inheritance the tithes of the Israelites that are offered ²⁶  to the Lord as a raised offering. That is why I said to them that among the Israelites they are to have no inheritance.”

Numbers 19:20

19:20 But the man who is unclean and does not purify himself, that person must be cut off from among the community, because he has polluted the sanctuary of the Lord; the water of purification was not sprinkled on him, so he is unclean.

Numbers 25:11

25:11 “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites, when he manifested such zeal ²⁷  for my sake among them, so that I did not consume the Israelites in my zeal. ²⁸ 

Numbers 27:3

27:3 “Our father died in the wilderness, although ²⁹  he was not part of ³⁰  the company of those that gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah; but he died for his own sin, ³¹  and he had no sons.

Numbers 35:5

35:5 “You must measure ³²  from outside the wall of the town on the east 1,000 yards, ³³  and on the south side 1,000 yards, and on the west side 1,000 yards, and on the north side 1,000 yards, with the town in the middle. ³⁴  This territory must belong to them as grazing land for the towns.

[5:21]  ¹ sn For information on such curses, see M. R. Lehmann, “Biblical Oaths,” ZAW 81 (1969): 74-92; A. C. Thiselton, “The Supposed Power of Words in the Biblical Writings,” JTS 25 (1974): 283-99; and F. C. Fensham, “Malediction and Benediction in Ancient Vassal Treaties and the Old Testament,” ZAW 74 (1962): 1-9.

[5:21]  ² tn Heb “the priest will say.”

[5:21]  ³ tn This interpretation takes the two nouns as a hendiadys. The literal wording is “the Lord make you a curse and an oath among the people.” In what sense would she be an oath? The point of the whole passage is that the priest is making her take an oath to see if she has been sinful and will be cursed.

[5:21]  ⁴ sn The outcome of this would be that she would be quoted by people in such forms of expression as an oath or a curse (see Jer 29:22).

[5:21]  ⁵ tn The construction uses the infinitive construct with the preposition to form an adverbial clause: “in the giving of the Lord…,” meaning, “if and when the Lord makes such and such to happen.”

[5:21]  ⁶ tn TEV takes the expression “your thigh” as a euphemism for the genitals: “cause your genital organs to shrink.”

[5:21]  ⁷ sn Most commentators take the expressions to be euphemisms of miscarriage or stillbirth, meaning that there would be no fruit from an illegitimate union. The idea of the abdomen swelling has been reinterpreted by NEB to mean “fall away.” If this interpretation stands, then the idea is that the woman has become pregnant, and that has aroused the suspicion of the husband for some reason. R. K. Harrison (Numbers [WEC], 111-13) discusses a variety of other explanations for diseases and conditions that might be described by these terms. He translates it with “miscarriage,” but leaves open what the description might actually be. Cf. NRSV “makes your uterus drop, your womb discharge.”

[8:16]  ⁸ tn As before, the emphasis is obtained by repeating the passive participle: “given, given to me.”

[8:16]  ⁹ tn Or “as substitutes” for all the firstborn of the Israelites.

[8:19]  ¹⁵ sn The firstborn were those that were essentially redeemed from death in Egypt when the blood was put on the doors. So in the very real sense they belonged to God (Exod 13:2,12). The firstborn was one who stood in special relationship to the father, being the successive offspring. Here, the Levites would stand in for the firstborn in that special role and special relationship. God also made it clear that the nation of Israel was his firstborn son (Exod 4:22-23), and so they stood in that relationship before all the nations. The tribe of Reuben was to have been the firstborn tribe, but in view of the presumptuous attempt to take over the leadership through pagan methods (Gen 35:22; 49:3-4), was passed over. The tribes of Levi and Simeon were also put down for their ancestors’ activities, but sanctuary service was still given to Levi.

[13:32]  ²² tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

[13:32]  ²³ tn Heb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.

[13:32]  ²⁴ tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (’akhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.

[13:32]  ²⁵ sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.

[13:32]  ²⁶ tn Heb “in its midst.”

[16:3]  ²⁹ tn The meaning of רַב־לָכֶם (rab-lakhem) is something like “you have assumed far too much authority.” It simply means “much to you,” perhaps “you have gone to far,” or “you are overreaching yourselves” (M. Noth, Numbers [OTL], 123). He is objecting to the exclusiveness of the system that Moses has been introducing.

[16:47]  ³⁶ tn Heb “took.”

[16:47]  ³⁷ tn Or “had spoken” (NASB); NRSV “had ordered.”

[17:6]  ⁴³ tn Heb “a rod for one leader, a rod for one leader.”

[17:6]  ⁴⁴ tn Heb “the house of their fathers.”

[18:23]  ⁵⁰ tn The verse begins with the perfect tense of עָבַד (’avad) with vav (ו) consecutive, making the form equal to the instructions preceding it. As its object the verb has the cognate accusative “service.”

[18:23]  ⁵¹ sn The Levites have the care of the tent of meeting, and so they are responsible for any transgressions against it.

[18:23]  ⁵² tn Heb “they”; the referent (the Levites) has been supplied in the translation for clarity.

[18:23]  ⁵³ tn The Hebrew text uses both the verb and the object from the same root to stress the point: They will not inherit an inheritance. The inheritance refers to land.

[18:24]  ⁵⁷ tn The classification of the perfect tense here too could be the perfect of resolve, since this law is declaring what will be their portion – “I have decided to give.”

[18:24]  ⁵⁸ tn In the Hebrew text the verb has no expressed subject (although the “Israelites” is certainly intended), and so it can be rendered as a passive.

[25:11]  ⁶⁴ tn Heb “he was zealous with my zeal.” The repetition of forms for “zeal” in the line stresses the passion of Phinehas. The word “zeal” means a passionate intensity to protect or preserve divine or social institutions.

[25:11]  ⁶⁵ tn The word for “zeal” now occurs a third time. While some English versions translate this word here as “jealousy” (KJV, ASV, NASB, NRSV), it carries the force of God’s passionate determination to defend his rights and what is right about the covenant and the community and parallels the “zeal” that Phinehas had just demonstrated.

[27:3]  ⁷¹ tn This clause begins with a vav (ו) on a pronoun, marking it out as a disjunctive vav. In this context it fits best to take it as a circumstantial clause introducing concession.

[27:3]  ⁷² tn Heb “in the midst of.”

[27:3]  ⁷³ tn The word order is emphatic: “but in/on account of his own sins he died.”

[35:5]  ⁷⁸ tn The verb is the Qal perfect of מָדַד (madad, “to measure”). With its vav (ו) consecutive it carries the same instructional force as the imperfect.

[35:5]  ⁷⁹ tn Heb “two thousand cubits” (also three more times in this verse). This would be a distance of 3,000 feet or 1,000 yards (1,350 meters).

[35:5]  ⁸⁰ sn The precise nature of the layout described here is not altogether clear. V. 4 speaks of the distance from the wall as being 500 yards; v. 5, however, describes measurements of 1,000 yards. Various proposals have been made in order to harmonize vv. 4 and 5. P. J. Budd, Numbers (WBC), 376, makes the following suggestion: “It may be best to assume that the cubits of the Levitical pasture lands are cubit frontages of land – in other words on each side of the city there was a block of land with a frontage of two thousand cubits (v 5), and a depth of 1000 cubits (v 4).”