But he said to him: But is literally “And.” In some languages such a contrastive conjunction will be needed to connect verse 30 to verse 29 in a natural way. Hobab apparently refused to go with the Israelites. Instead of using only pronouns in the clause he said to him (as in the Hebrew text), many languages may need to specify at least one of the people involved; for example, Good News Translation says “Hobab answered.”

I will not go; I will depart to my own land and to my kindred: The Hebrew verb rendered depart is literally “go.” The Hebrew expression for my own land does not refer to Hobab’s property, but to his country. Kindred translates a Hebrew word meaning “relatives” and refers to all those related by both blood and marriage. In Hebrew the phrases my own land and my kindred are an example of hendiadys, which is a figure of speech in which a single complex idea is expressed by two words or structures, usually connected by a conjunction. Good News Translation does not take this stylistic feature into account by combining these phrases into “my native land.” A better model for this verse, based on New Living Translation and Revised English Bible, is:

• But Hobab replied, “No, I will not go. I must return to my own country and my own people/family.”

In some languages it will be natural to translate to my own land and to my kindred with plural pronouns; for example, Chewa has “to our place where our relatives live.”

Quoted with permission from de Regt, Lénart J. and Wendland, Ernst R. A Handbook on Numbers. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .