So their posterity perished from Heshbon, as far as Dibon: So renders the Hebrew waw conjunction (literally “And”). Here it introduces a concluding and/or climactic expression, so we prefer “So now” instead of “But now” in Good News Bible. As Revised Standard Version‘s footnote on their posterity perished from Heshbon (similarly Levine) indicates, this rendering follows the Septuagint. Good News Bible is similar with “their descendants are destroyed, All the way from Heshbon.” The Hebrew text actually reads “we have shot at them. Heshbon has perished.” The Septuagint may have read the Hebrew word for “we have shot at them” (niram) as “their shoot” (ninam), which is an image for offspring in this context. Following Rashi, Alter reads the Hebrew verb niram as a noun meaning “their yoke.” To put cattle (or people) under a yoke is to master them. So Alter (taken from Rashi) begins this verse with “And their mastery is lost….” However, the more widely accepted interpretation of the Hebrew word niram is to treat it as a first person plural verb of the root y r h, meaning “we shot at them” (so Rashbam) or “we have cast them down” (New Jewish Publication Society Version; similarly Noth with “we have gained the upper hand”). NFB offers a helpful, if rather prosaic model for this line, saying “But when we shot our arrows at them, everything perished, from Heshbon as far as Dibon.” The pronoun “we” most likely refers to the Israelites who destroyed Heshbon (see the comments on verse 27). (If these were the words of the original Amorite singers, who had praised Sihon’s great victory, it would have been easy for the Israelites to apply these same words to themselves.) Dibon was a Moabite city east of the Dead Sea. The famous Moabite Stone was found there.

And we laid waste until fire spread to Medeba: The Hebrew verb rendered we laid waste is nashim. Good News Bible renders this verb as a place called “Nashim,” which we do not recommend. This verb fits well here as a parallel to “we have shot at them” in the previous line. New Jewish Publication Society Version translates it well with “We have wrought desolation,” and so does New International Version with “We have demolished them.” As the Revised Standard Version footnote on until fire spread to Medeba indicates, this rendering follows the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Hebrew has “to Nophah which to Medeba.” The Hebrew word for “Nophah” can be read as a verb meaning “is kindled” (Hebrew Old Testament Text Project), and the Hebrew word for “which” (ʾasher) is similar to the word for fire (ʾesh). We recommend the reading in Revised Standard Version (so also Hebrew Old Testament Text Project), since the fire here and the fire in verse 28 form an inclusio, while the Hebrew reduces this phrase to a piece of geographical information. Medeba was a town on the main north-south highway, south of Heshbon and east of the Dead Sea. A possible model for this line is “We have demolished them like a fire as far as Medeba.”

Despite the difficulty of this verse, its general sense and purpose seems clear, for it speaks of the complete destruction of Moab and now also of the Amorites throughout the territory that they had occupied, since Heshbon lay east of the northern end of the Dead Sea, while Dibon lay just north of the Arnon River to the south. Therefore we do not recommend Good News Bible‘s footnote on this verse, which is “Verse 30 in Hebrew is unclear.”

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 .