Deuteronomy 26:6

Summary

The verse recounts three successive actions the Egyptians performed against "us": they did harm, they afflicted, and they imposed hard labor. All three verbs share a first-person plural pronominal suffix, marking Israel as the collective object of Egyptian action.

Key words

• yara'u ("they did harm to", H7489A) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb; the causative stem indicates the Egyptians actively brought about harm, not merely experienced hostility toward Israel.
• ye'anu ("they afflicted", H6031B) — piel (intensive) narrative verb; the intensive stem marks repeated or forceful affliction, distinct from the causative sense of the previous verb.
• yittenu ("they put", H5414H) — qal (simple) narrative verb; the basic stem of "to give/put," here used with the preposition 'alei ("on") to mean imposing something upon someone.
• avodah ("labor", H5656I) — feminine singular noun, the direct object being imposed.
• qashah ("hard", H7186) — feminine singular adjective agreeing with avodah, intensifying the noun it modifies.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three narrative (wayyiqtol) verbs, each introduced by the vav conjunction that links sequential events: yara'u, ye'anu, yittenu. Each verb carries a first-person plural suffix (-nu, "us"/"our"), so the grammatical subject throughout is ha-Mitzrim ("the Egyptians", H4713), stated once after the first verb and then implied for the rest. This produces an escalating structure: first a general act of harm (hiphil), then an intensified affliction (piel), then a concrete imposition of avodah qashah ("hard labor"), a noun-adjective pair placed at the very end of the sentence, giving it emphatic final position.

The shift between verbal stems (hiphil, piel, qal) shows grammatical distinctions of causation and intensity that are not overtly marked in the English or Spanish translations, which render all three actions with roughly parallel verbs ("mistreated," "afflicted," "put to labor"). The direct object marker 'oto (H0853) before the first suffix is grammatically required in Hebrew but has no independent lexical meaning of its own.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint preserves the three-verb structure of the Hebrew (ἐκάκωσαν, ἐταπείνωσαν, ἐπέθηκαν), each governing "us" (ἡμᾶς/ἡμῖν), matching the Hebrew's threefold sequence. The Vulgate, however, restructures this into two finite verbs (afflixerunt, persecuti sunt) followed by a participial clause (imponentes onera gravissima, "imposing very heavy burdens"), rather than three parallel finite verbs. This changes the syntactic balance of the sentence, subordinating the "imposing labor" action to a participle instead of presenting it as an independent narrative action equal to the first two, as in the Hebrew and Greek.