Exodus 12:32

Summary

Exodus 12:32 records a command spoken by Pharaoh to the Israelites, telling them to take both their flocks and herds, to depart as they had requested, and to bless him. The verse consists of three imperative actions strung together: taking livestock, going, and blessing.

Key words

• gam ("both/also", H1571) — this adverb appears three times in the verse (positions 1, 4, 15), each time marking an additional item: flocks, herds, and "me" (Pharaoh), emphasizing inclusion of each element.
• tzonKhem ("your flock", H6629G + H9026) — a construct noun with pronominal suffix, meaning "flock of you (pl.)"; the construct form links the noun directly to the possessive suffix without an intervening preposition.
• keChu ("take", H3947G) — qal imperative, masculine plural, giving a direct command to the group being addressed.
• dibarTem ("you said", H1696G) — piel perfect, masculine plural, referring to a prior completed speech act; the piel stem here carries the sense of "speaking" as an intensified or declarative action.
• veRakhTem ("you will bless", H1288) — piel sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), masculine plural; this form continues the narrative chain begun by the preceding imperatives, functioning here as a continued command ("and bless") rather than a simple future.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with two parallel construct phrases, gam-tzonKhem ("both your flock") and gam-bekarKhem ("also your herd"), both governed by the single imperative keChu ("take") that follows them. This word order places the objects before the verb, giving emphatic weight to "flocks" and "herds" as the items being permitted or commanded to be taken. The clause ka'aSher dibarTem ("just as you have said") uses a relative particle plus a piel perfect verb, pointing back to an earlier statement attributed to the addressees — the grammar marks this as a completed speech act referenced in retrospect, not something happening in the moment.

The verse then shifts to a second imperative, Lekhu ("go"), joined by a simple conjunction va-. The following verb, veRakhTem ("and you will bless"), is a sequential (vav-consecutive) perfect, a common Biblical Hebrew construction where a perfect verb prefixed with vav continues a chain of commands or sequential actions begun by an initial imperative. Grammatically, this form allows the verb to function as a further command in sequence, despite its perfect (completed-action) morphology — a nuance not always visible in translations that render it simply as future ("you will bless") or as a coordinated imperative ("and bless"). The final gam-oti ("also me") uses the direct object marker with a first-person suffix, marking "me" as the object of the blessing, with gam again stressing inclusion of the speaker in the action.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders dibarTem ("you have said") as unstated in a subordinate clause; instead it uses a participle (ἀναλαβόντες, "having taken") and issues the going as a separate imperative (πορεύεσθε), restructuring the syntax without explicit reference to "just as you have said." The Vulgate preserves the comparative clause ("ut petieratis," "as you had asked") similarly to the Hebrew ka'aSher. Both the LXX (κἀμέ, "and me") and Vulgate (mihi, "for me") render the final phrase gam-oti without reproducing the repeated emphatic gam structure that recurs three times in the Hebrew.