Exodus 12:42

Summary

The verse names the night of the Exodus a leil shimurim ("night of vigil(s)", H3915/H8107) belonging to YHWH (H3068), on account of his bringing Israel out of Egypt. It then repeats the designation, stating that this same night is a shimurim for YHWH, to be kept by all the descendants of Israel across their generations.

Key words

• leil ("night of", H3915) — masculine singular noun in construct state, meaning it is bound to the following word shimurim, forming the phrase "a night of vigils/watchings" rather than "a night" and "vigils" as two separate items.
• shimurim ("vigils", H8107) — masculine plural noun, appearing twice (once in v.42a, once in v.42b). Its plural form suggests either intensity or repeated/ongoing watching rather than a single act.
• hu ("it/he", H1931) — third-person personal pronoun, used twice (once before leil shimurim, once before ha-laylah ha-zeh), functioning as a copula-like link ("it is...") that identifies the night with the quality of shimurim.
• le-hotzi'am ("to bring them out", H3318) — Hiphil infinitive construct with third-person plural suffix ("them," H9038). The Hiphil stem is causative: it is not that Israel "went out" but that YHWH "caused them to go out."
• le-dorotam ("for their generations", H1755) — feminine plural noun in construct with third-person plural suffix, marking the extension of the observance across successive generations.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two parallel halves, each opened by the pronoun hu ("it," H1931), which functions to assert identity: "it [is] a night of vigils... it [is] this night." The first half links the night to the causative act of YHWH bringing Israel out of Egypt (le-hotzi'am me-eretz Mitzrayim, "to bring them out from the land of Egypt," H3318/H0776/H4714), using the infinitive construct with prefixed le- (H9005), which expresses purpose or result ("in order to/in the bringing out"). The second half restates the same designation — ha-laylah ha-zeh ("this night," H3915/H2088) — as belonging la-YHWH (H9005+H3068) again, followed once more by shimurim (H8107), before extending the scope to "all the sons/children of Israel" (le-khol-benei Yisrael, H3605/H1121/H3478) "for their generations" (le-dorotam, H1755).

The repetition of shimurim and of the pronoun hu creates a chiastic-like doubling: the night is first characterized in relation to YHWH's action of extraction, then in relation to Israel's ongoing observance. The construct chain leil shimurim leaves ambiguous whether the "watching" is performed by YHWH, by Israel, or is a quality inherent to the night itself, since the plural noun shimurim is not overtly marked with a subject in either occurrence.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders shimurim as προφυλακή ("advance guard/watch"), aligning with the sense of "watching," but supplies a purpose clause with ὥστε ("so that") where the Hebrew uses the infinitive construct le-hotzi'am directly. The Vulgate translates leil shimurim as "nox observabilis" ("a night to be observed") and shifts le-hotzi'am into a temporal clause "quando eduxit eos" ("when he led them out"), making explicit a causal/temporal relation that the Hebrew infinitive construction leaves more compact and grammatically ambiguous between purpose and result.