Exodus 12:27

Summary

This verse gives the explanatory formula the Israelites are to recite about the Passover ritual: the sacrifice is called Pesach ("Passover", H6453) because Yehovah "passed over" (pasach, H6452A) the houses of the Israelites in Egypt while striking the Egyptians and sparing Israelite houses. The verse closes with the people's physical response of bowing and prostrating.

Key words

• Pesach ("passover", H6453) — construct-form title naming the sacrifice; grammatically linked to zevach ("sacrifice of", H2077) as "a sacrifice of Pesach."
• pasach ("he passed over", H6452A) — qal perfect, same root as Pesach; the noun and verb share the root p-s-ch, so the name of the offering and the action it commemorates are built from the identical Hebrew root.
• be.nagpo ("when he struck", from H5062 with preposition be-, H9003) — infinitive construct with pronominal suffix "his," meaning literally "in his striking," marking simultaneity ("when/while he struck").
• hitzil ("he delivered", H5337) — hiphil (causative) perfect, indicating Yehovah as the causal agent who actively brought about the houses' safety, contrasted with the destructive action against Egypt.
• vayishtachavu ("they bowed down", H7812) — hishtaphel narrative form, a distinct bowing-prostration verb sequenced after vayiqqod ("it bowed low", H6915), forming a two-verb pair describing the people's posture.

What the text says

The sentence is built as direct speech introduced by va'amartem ("and you will say", H0559), a sequential perfect continuing prior narrative instructions. The core clause is a nominal predication: zevach-pesach hu la-Yehovah — "a sacrifice of Pesach [is] it, to Yehovah" — where hu (H1931) functions as the copula-like pronoun linking subject and predicate. This is followed by a relative clause introduced by asher ("who", H0834A), describing Yehovah's action: he "passed over" (pasach) the houses of Israel's sons in Egypt. The root shared between Pesach and pasach creates a built-in etymological explanation within the Hebrew that is not reproducible as a single word in translation.

The temporal clause be-nagpo et-Mitzrayim ("when he struck Egypt") uses an infinitive construct with a possessive suffix, a common Hebrew way of marking simultaneous action without a separate finite verb. The hiphil perfect hitzil ("he delivered") then contrasts causative destruction (striking Egypt) with causative preservation (delivering Israelite houses), both attributed to the same subject, Yehovah. The final two verbs, vayiqqod and vayishtachavu, are narrative (vav-consecutive) forms describing sequential action: the people first "bowed low" then "prostrated," a doubled expression of physical response.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders pasach ("passed over", H6452A) as eskepasen ("he sheltered/covered"), a different verbal image than the Hebrew's "passing over." The Vulgate's transivit ("he passed over/through") stays closer to the Hebrew root's sense of movement past the houses. The LXX also translates zevach-pesach simply as thysia ("sacrifice") followed by touto ("this"), without a separate title-word corresponding to Pesach, so the root-wordplay visible in the Hebrew between the noun and verb is not reproduced in the Greek.