HEBREW WORD STUDY – THE HEBREW PLACE – HEBRON  חברונ  

Numbers 13:22:  “And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, [were]. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)”

I was reading Chapter 13 in the Book of Numbers when I ran across a grammatical anomaly.  “And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron”  Practically every modern English translation takes the cowards way out and translate this simply as “came unto Hebron.”  You slippery little translators you.  There are a few translations such as the NASB and ASB which come right out and wrongly render this as “they came unto Hebron.”  Well, I shouldn’t say wrongly as they have every right to call this little grammatical anomaly an exception to the rule.  Clearly, the sentence is referring to the 12 spies who ascended South of the promised land and came unto Hebron. Since this is the same sentence you would assume it was they who came unto Hebron. Linguistically it makes perfect sense to assume word same is a plural verb and ignore the fact that it is really in a singular form. It is clearly an anomaly or an exception to the grammatical rule that it should be rendered: he came.  

The word in Hebrew for came is vayaboth, the dagesh in the Yod is there because the Vav conjunction is attached, but the rest of the word clearly indicates that it is singular. It would need a Vav pronoun at the end to make this a plural.  Vayaboth is singular and if we read it as singular – he came, this would tell an amazing story.

I went to the Talmud and indeed I found that the sages, particularly Rashi accepted the singular and translated it that way.  So why would the text say: “And they ascended by the south, and he came unto Hebron.” 

Stop and consider what Hebron was. Hebron is located on the Southern West Bank of Israel about 19 miles South Jerusalem. The name itself means the place of the Hebrews.  However, it can be traced back to two Semitic roots which coalesce in the Semitic form HBR which appears in the Hebrew and Amorite and could indicate a wide range of means from a colleague, to unite or even a word for a friend.   Your lexicon will say it means an alliance. 

Israel captured Hebron in the six-day war of 1967. However, the Oslo Agreement of 1997 divided Hebron into H1 under the Palestinian Authority and H2 under the Israeli authority where there exists a rather tenuous alliance. 

But Hebron was the land where Abraham settled, it is known today as the land of the Patriarchs. It is the area where the Cave of Machpelah or the Cave of the Patriarchs is located and is the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, and Leah.  It is this cave that Jacob’s bones were carried from Egypt to its final resting place. 

Arriving in Hebron should have been a very emotional time for the spies. I remember when I was in Bible College just one year after the six-day war where Israel not only capture Hebron but Jerusalem as well. I met a young Israeli soldier name Penni who was part of the special forces of the IDF.  He and his teams parachuted outside Jerusalem during the war and blew a hole in the wall of Jerusalem and capture the part of the old city with the wailing wall.  He said he was an atheist at the time but he recalled as a child how his father would take him to Mt. Olives and point out Jerusalem and tell him that God would one day return that city to Israel.  He said when he approached that wailing wall which was once a part of the Jewish temple he fell to his knees and wept surrounding his life to God.  

I can’t help but believe that this same emotion must have overcome the spies, except for one problem, Hebron is where the Anaks were. The Anaks were the forefathers of Anakim, the Nephilim and were the giants that scared the pants off the spies. You see they traveled the borders of the Promised Land where it was safe and when they ascended by the South only one spy had enough guts to go into Hebron.  In Joshua 21:3-12 we find that this land was apportioned to Caleb when they finally entered the land.  Hence the sages teach that the “he came” is a reference to Caleb who left the border and went unto Hebron where, like Penni, he fell to his knees before the cave of the Patriarchs wept and surrendered his life to God to take back their homeland.  It was just one out of the twelve.  If all twelve went to Hebron, I believe they too would have fallen on the knees and wept and committed themselves to God, but the giants scared them silly and thus the giants ruled for another 40 years.   That is why it is important to literally translate this as he came.

You see there is a message here, for me at least. God has given you a promise and now is the time to claim that promise but beware, there are giants surrounding that promise, it is up to you to go and claim that promise for if you trust the giants to God, God will bring you to a place where you will fall to your knees and surrender that promise to Him to recapture it for His sake.