Exodus 12:33

Summary

The verse describes Egypt pressing the Israelite people to leave the land quickly, giving as the reason a statement attributed to the Egyptians: "we are all dying" or "we are all about to die." The Hebrew presents this as a cause-and-effect sequence within the narrative flow of the exodus account.

Key words

• techezaq ("it urged", H2388G) — qal narrative verb form; continues the story sequence ("and then...") with a feminine subject, matching the feminine noun Mitzrayim.
• Mitzrayim ("Egypt", H4714G) — proper name functioning as the grammatical subject of the urging; treated as a singular (often feminine) collective entity.
• maher ("hurry", H4116A) — piel infinitive, an intensive verbal form expressing urgency in the action of hurrying.
• shallach ("send away", H7971G) — piel infinitive with the pronominal suffix -am ("them", H9038) attached, meaning "to send them away"; the piel stem intensifies the causative sense of sending.
• metim ("dying/about to die", H4191) — qal participle, masculine plural, describing an ongoing or imminent state rather than a completed action; participles in Hebrew denote continuous or characteristic states, not a single finished event.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative vav on techezaq, marking this as the next event in the sequence of the exodus narrative. The subject is Mitzrayim ("Egypt", H4714G), grammatically treated as a singular entity acting "upon" ('al, H5921A) "the people" (ha'am, H5971A). Two piel infinitives follow in sequence — maher ("to hurry", H4116A) and shallach ("to send away", H7971G) — both attached with the preposition le- ("to", H9005), forming a purpose construction: Egypt urged the people "to hurry in sending them away." The suffix -am on shallach specifies "them" as the object, referring back to "the people."

The causal clause is introduced by ki (H3588A), which can function as "for" or "that," followed by the qal perfect 'ameru ("they said", H0559) — a completed speech act. The content of that speech uses kullanu ("all of us", H3605 + H9025), a construct noun with a first-person plural suffix, followed by the qal participle metim (H4191). The participle form does not mark a single completed death but rather an ongoing or imminent state — closer to "we are dying/about to die" than "we have died."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the subject explicitly as "the Egyptians" (οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι) rather than the singular collective Mitzrayim found in the Hebrew. The Vulgate similarly uses "Ægyptii" (the Egyptians), a plural noun, diverging from the Hebrew's grammatically singular subject form. Regarding the final clause, the Hebrew participle metim ("dying/about to die") is rendered by the LXX as a present tense (ἀποθνήσκομεν, "we are dying") and by the Vulgate as a future (moriemur, "we will die"), reflecting different ways of handling the Hebrew participle's aspectual nuance across the versions.