Exodus 10:9

Summary

Moses answers Pharaoh that the Israelites will depart together with their young and old, their sons and daughters, and their flocks and herds. He justifies this comprehensive departure by stating that a festival of Yehovah belongs to them.

Key words

• neLekh ("we will go", H1980G) — qal imperfect, 1st person plural, repeated twice (once after the elders/youths list, once after the children/livestock list), structurally splitting the sentence into two parallel declarations of "going."
• n'arei ("young men", H5288) — masculine plural construct, paired with zekenei to form a merism (young–old) marking the totality of the generational range.
• zekenei ("old men", H2205H) — masculine plural construct, completes the construct chain with the suffix -nu ("our"), naming the elders who will accompany the group.
• chag ("festival of", H2282) — masculine singular construct, introduces the causal clause explaining the reason for the total departure: a chag belonging to Yehovah.
• ki ("for/that", H3588A) — subordinating particle opening the final clause, linking the request to its stated cause.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two coordinated clauses, each ending in the same verb neLekh ("we will go", H1980G) in the qal imperfect. The first clause lists bi-n'arei-nu ("with our young men") and u-vi-zekenei-nu ("and with our old men") as the parties who will go. The second clause repeats the verb and adds four more categories, each marked by the preposition be- / vi- ("with") attached to a plural construct noun with the suffix -nu ("our"): sons (vaneinu), daughters (u-vi-venotenu), flocks (tzoneinu), and herds (u-vi-vekareinu). This repetition of neLekh creates a rhetorical doubling rather than two separate actions — the speaker enumerates every category of dependents and possessions before restating the verb, giving the list a cumulative, emphatic weight in the Hebrew that a single continuous list in translation does not preserve.

The final clause, introduced by ki ("for", H3588A), gives the grounds for this total departure: chag-Yehovah lanu — literally "a festival of Yehovah [belongs] to us." The construct chain chag-Yehovah ("festival of Yehovah") is followed by the prepositional phrase lanu ("to us"), a non-verbal clause of possession/belonging with no explicit verb "to be" in the Hebrew, which the English gloss supplies as "[will belong] to us."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two Hebrew clauses (each closing with neLekh) as a single Greek sentence with one verb, πορευσόμεθα ("we will go"), losing the doubled verb structure of the Hebrew. The Vulgate similarly reads pergemus once, structured as a single continuous list ("cum parvulis... et senioribus... cum filiis... cum ovibus et armentis"), also merging the two Hebrew clauses into one. The Vulgate additionally expands Domini ("of the Lord") to "Domini Dei nostri" ("of the Lord our God"), an addition not present in the Hebrew chag-Yehovah ("festival of Yehovah") or in the LXX's κυρίου ("of the Lord").