Exodus 12:44

Summary

Exodus 12:44 specifies that any slave who has been purchased with silver may eat the Passover offering, but only after he has been circumcised. The verse links the act of circumcision to eligibility for eating "it" (the paschal meal referred to earlier in the chapter).

Key words

• khol ("every", H3605) — construct form beginning a chain that defines the category "every slave of a man."
• 'eved ("slave of", H5650) — masculine singular construct, linked to 'ish to specify "a man's slave," i.e., a male slave belonging to someone.
• miknat ("[the] purchase of", H4736) — feminine singular construct joined to kasef, forming "purchase of silver," qualifying the slave as one acquired by payment rather than born into the household.
• malTah ("you will circumcise", H4135A) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative sequence begun by the preceding clauses; the form ties the act of circumcision temporally to what follows.
• yokhal ("he will eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, denoting an action that becomes possible only after the preceding condition is fulfilled.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence builds through a series of construct chains: khol + 'eved + 'ish + miknat + kasef forms a single extended noun phrase, "every slave of a man, purchase of silver," identifying the subject as a male slave acquired through monetary purchase. This chain sets up the condition before the main verbs appear. The sequential perfect malTah ("you will circumcise") continues the discourse sequence, addressing the reader/community directly in the second person, and is followed by the adverb 'az ("then", H0227A), which marks a clear temporal-logical hinge: only after circumcision does the next action become possible.

The imperfect yokhal ("he will eat") expresses the resulting permitted action, and the prepositional phrase bo ("in it", H9003 + H9033) uses a pronominal suffix referring back to an antecedent object (the Passover offering, established earlier in the chapter, though not part of this verse's word list). The grammatical sequence — construct chain (identifying the person), sequential perfect (the required act), adverb "then," imperfect (the resulting permission) — encodes a conditional relationship: circumcision as a precondition for participation in eating.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the single Hebrew construct chain "slave of a man, purchase of silver" as two separate categories joined by ἢ ("or"): οἰκέτην ("house-slave") ἢ ἀργυρώνητον ("bought-with-silver"), rather than one continuous descriptive phrase for a single kind of slave. The Vulgate uses a passive verb, circumcidetur ("shall be circumcised"), where the Hebrew malTah is an active second-person form ("you will circumcise him"), shifting the grammatical subject of the action from an addressed "you" to an impersonal passive construction.