Exodus 14:10

Summary

The verse describes the moment Pharaoh's army closed in on the Israelites: they looked up, saw the Egyptians marching behind them, became greatly afraid, and cried out to Yehovah. The Hebrew text links these actions in a rapid narrative chain using consecutive verb forms.

Key words

• hikRiv ("he drew near", H7126G) — hiphil (causative) perfect of the root for "near"; Pharaoh is the causing subject of the approach, distinct from a simple qal "to be near."
• yisʼU ("they lifted up", H5375M) — qal narrative (vav-consecutive) form; introduces the next event in sequence ("and then they lifted...").
• hinNeh ("there!", H2009) — interjection marking a sudden visual discovery from the Israelites' point of view, drawing attention to what they see.
• noSeaʻ ("[was] marching", H5265) — qal participle, masculine singular, describing Egypt's action as an ongoing state observed at that moment, not a completed act.
• yitzʻaKu ("they cried out", H6817) — qal narrative form, parallel to yisʼU and yiyreʼU, continuing the chain of sequential actions.

What the text says

The verse is built almost entirely on narrative (vav-consecutive) verb forms — yisʼU, yiyreʼU, yitzʻaKu — which in Biblical Hebrew narrative prose signal a chain of sequential events: "and they lifted up... and they feared... and they cried out." This chain creates a sense of one action flowing directly into the next, without separate temporal markers. The verse opens, however, with hikRiv ("he drew near", H7126G), a perfect (non-narrative) form, which sets the circumstance — Pharaoh's approach — as background before the narrative chain of Israelite reactions begins.

The phrase *ʻeinei-*Hem ("their eyes") uses the construct form of ʻeinei ("eyes", H5869A) with a possessive suffix, in the idiom "to lift the eyes," meaning "to look up" or "to notice visually" — the direct object marker 'et (H0853) confirms "eyes" is the grammatical object of yisʼU, not an independent clause. The interjection hinNeh ("there!", H2009) then presents what they saw as a vivid, immediate perception, and the participle noSeaʻ ("[was] marching", H5265) portrays the Egyptian advance as an action in progress at the moment of sighting, rather than a completed event.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening differently: instead of stating that Pharaoh "drew near" (hikRiv), it begins with the Israelites "looking up with their eyes" (ἀναβλέψαντες...ὁρῶσιν) as the first action, and describes the Egyptians as having "encamped" (ἐστρατοπέδευσαν) behind them, rendering the Hebrew participle noSeaʻ ("marching") with a different verb of encampment rather than movement. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew order more closely, opening with Pharaoh's approach (appropinquasset Pharao) before the Israelites "lifted up their eyes" and "saw" (viderunt) the Egyptians — adding an explicit verb of seeing not present as a separate word in the Hebrew, where "seeing" is implied by the idiom "lifted their eyes" plus hinneh.