Exodus 1:10

Summary

Pharaoh proposes a plan of action against the Israelites: to "deal shrewdly" with them before their growth becomes a military threat. The verse sets out a chain of feared future consequences — increase, war, defection to enemies, and departure from the land — linked by a string of sequential Hebrew verb forms.

Key words

• nit.cha.ke.Mah ("let us deal wisely", H2449) — hithpael form, a reflexive/self-directed stem; the "wisdom" is enacted for the benefit of the subject (Pharaoh and his court) against the object, rather than a neutral or benevolent wisdom.
• pen ("lest", H6435) — subordinating particle introducing the feared outcome that motivates the imperative Ha.va ("give/come", H3051).
• tik.Re.nah ("they will happen", H7122I) — qal imperfect, feminine plural verb form, paired with the grammatically singular noun mil.cha.Mah ("war", H4421); this number mismatch is a feature of the Hebrew clause not visible in translation.
• no.Saf ("it will be added", H3254H) — niphal (passive) sequential perfect; the people are grammatically the object being "added" to the enemies, not the grammatical agents of the action.
• so.ne.'Ei.nu ("those who hate us", H8130) — qal participle, construct plural with pronominal suffix -nu ("our"), literally "haters of us," functioning as a substantive.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of consequences using vav-sequential perfects (ve.Ha.yah, ve.no.Saf, ve.nil.cham, ve.'a.Lah), a common Hebrew narrative device for projecting a hypothetical future sequence: if war occurs, then the people will be added to the enemies, then they will fight against "us," then they will go up from the land. Each step is presented as an automatic consequence of the previous one, without additional connectives beyond "and" (ve).

The subject throughout much of the passage (from yir.Beh onward) is grammatically singular hu' ("it/he", H1931), treating the Israelite population as a single collective entity rather than plural individuals. This singular framing continues in no.Saf and nil.cham-Ba.nu, both third-person singular masculine forms, despite the collective referent being a whole people. The mismatch between the singular mil.cha.Mah and plural verb tik.Re.nah is a further grammatical irregularity in the Hebrew clause structure, not something reflected by the versions' singular renderings.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the collective singular referent as plural: autous ("them") and houtoi ("these") where the Hebrew consistently uses singular forms (lo, hu'). The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's singular pattern more closely, using eum ("him") and singular verb forms like addatur ("let him be added"). The Hebrew's gam ("also", H1571) — emphasizing the added dimension of the population joining the enemies — appears in the LXX as kai... kai ("also/and"), but is not distinctly rendered in the Vulgate text given.