Exodus 10:12

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to stretch out his hand over Egypt so that locusts will rise up over the land and consume all remaining vegetation — everything the hail had left untouched.

Key words

• neTeh ("stretch out", H5186) — qal imperative, a direct command to Moses, establishing the action he must perform.
• ya'al ("may it come up", H5927) — qal jussive, expressing the intended or resulting consequence of the imperative: the locust's ascent over the land.
• yo'khal ("it may eat", H0398) — qal imperfect with vav, continuing the jussive chain begun by ya'al, marking a further result: consumption of vegetation.
• hish'ir ("it left over", H7604) — hiphil perfect of the causative stem, describing the hail's completed action of "causing to remain" — i.e., what it spared.
• 'arbeh ("locust", H0697) — singular noun with definite article attached to the preposition ba- ("for the locust/with the locust"), functioning as a collective referring to the locust swarm as a whole.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula va-yo'mer ("and he said", H0559) introducing direct speech from YHWH to Moses. The command itself is a single imperative, neTeh yadekha ("stretch out your hand"), followed by the prepositional phrase 'al-'eretz Mitzrayim ba-'arbeh ("over the land of Egypt for the locust"), which specifies both the target (the land) and the purpose/instrument (the locust) of the gesture in one clause.

What follows is a chain of three verbs linked by the conjunction ve- ("and"): ya'al (jussive, "let it come up"), yo'khal (imperfect, "let it eat"), and, embedded within the object of yo'khal, the hiphil perfect hish'ir describing what the hail (ha-barad, H1259) had left standing. This chain expresses a sequence of purpose and result flowing directly from the initial hand gesture: the raising of the hand causes the locust to ascend, which in turn causes it to consume the vegetation not already destroyed by the hail. The two direct objects, kol-'esev ha-'aretz ("all the vegetation of the land") and kol 'asher hish'ir ha-barad ("all that the hail left"), are both marked by 'et (H0853), the untranslatable object marker, showing they are equally the target of the verb "eat."

Differences between versions

The LXX adds a phrase not present in the Hebrew word list: καὶ πάντα τὸν καρπὸν τῶν ξύλων ("and all the fruit of the trees"), expanding what the locusts devour beyond the Hebrew's "all vegetation of the land." The Vulgate separates the command into two clauses — "extende manum tuam... ad locustam, ut ascendat" ("stretch your hand... for the locust, that it may ascend") — rendering as a purpose clause what the Hebrew presents as a jussive continuation joined by ve-.