Exodus 1:12
וְכַאֲשֶׁר יְעַנּוּ אֹתוֹ כֵּן יִרְבֶּה וְכֵן יִפְרֹץ וַיָּקֻצוּ מִפְּנֵי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
✦ Hebrew interlinear
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✦ The same verse in five languages
וְכַאֲשֶׁר֙ יְעַנּ֣וּ אֹת֔וֹ כֵּ֥ן יִרְבֶּ֖ה וְכֵ֣ן יִפְרֹ֑ץ וַיָּקֻ֕צוּ מִפְּנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
καθότι δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐταπείνουν, τοσούτῳ πλείους ἐγίνοντο, καὶ ἴσχυον σφόδρα σφόδρα· καὶ ἐβδελύσσοντο οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι ἀπὸ τῶν υἱῶν Ἰσραήλ.
Greek text from Swete's edition, CC BY-SA 4.0
Latin (Vulgate)
Quantoque opprimebant eos, tanto magis multiplicabantur, et crescebant:
Pero cuanto más los oprimían, más se multiplicaban y más se extendían. Los egipcios comenzaron a temer a los hijos de Israel,
Classic Spanish (Reina-Valera 1909)
Empero cuanto más los oprimían, tanto más se multiplicaban y crecían: así que estaban ellos fastidiados de los hijos de Israel.
But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and flourished; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.
✦ What the text says
Summary
The verse presents a proportional relationship: the more the Egyptians afflicted the Israelites, the more they multiplied and spread. This growth results in the Egyptians experiencing dread because of the Israelites.
Key words
- ye.'a.Nu ("people afflicted", H6031B) — piel imperfect, third person plural. The piel stem intensifies the action, marking deliberate, harsh affliction rather than incidental hardship.
- ken ("so", H3651C) — adverb appearing twice (lines 7 and 10), creating a correlative structure with ka'asher ("as/just as") that expresses direct proportionality between two actions.
- yir.Beh ("it increased", H7235A) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular, referring back to the people as a collective singular subject.
- yif.Rotz ("it spread", H6555) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular. This verb carries a sense of breaking out or bursting forth, stronger than simple increase.
- i.ya.Ku.tzu ("people felt dread", H6973) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive), marking the next event in the story sequence: the direct consequence of the multiplication just described.
What the text says
The Hebrew sentence is built on a correlative pair: ka'asher ("as") paired twice with ken ("so"). This construction — "just as X, so Y" — creates a grammatical parallelism that ties the affliction (ye.'a.Nu) directly to the outcomes of increase (yir.Beh) and spreading (yif.Rotz). All three main verbs (ye.'a.Nu, yir.Beh, yif.Rotz) are in the imperfect form, which in this context conveys ongoing, repeated, or habitual action — the affliction and the growth are presented as continuous processes running in parallel, not single events.
The clause then shifts with the narrative vav on i.ya.Ku.tzu, marking a new sequential event in the story: as a result of the preceding pattern, the Egyptians "felt dread." The phrase mi.pe.Nei ("because of," literally "from the face of") followed by be.Nei Yis.ra.'El ("the people of Israel") identifies the source of this dread — the growing population itself, described via the construct chain "sons of Israel."
Differences between versions
The LXX renders yif.Rotz ("it spread", H6555) with a phrase meaning "they were strong exceedingly, exceedingly" (ἴσχυον σφόδρα σφόδρα), emphasizing strength rather than spreading or breaking forth as in the Hebrew. The Vulgate's crescebant ("they grew") likewise softens the specific nuance of yif.Rotz. For i.ya.Ku.tzu ("people felt dread", H6973), the LXX uses ἐβδελύσσοντο ("they abhorred/were disgusted"), while the Hebrew term denotes dread or fear rather than disgust; the Vulgate in the provided text omits this clause entirely, ending at crescebant.
This explanation describes the text using linguistic data; it adds no doctrine or confessional interpretation.