Exodus 14:20

Summary

The verse describes the pillar going to a position between the Egyptian and Israelite camps. There it functioned as cloud and darkness on one side while illuminating the night, so that the two camps did not draw near each other throughout the entire night.

Key words

• va-yavo ("it went", H0935G) — qal narrative form, masculine singular; continues the story with "and then it went," referring back to the moving entity (the pillar) already active in surrounding verses.
• he-'anan ("the cloud", H6051) and ha-choshekh ("the darkness", H2822) — both nouns carry the definite article and are joined by ve ("and"), placed as a paired subject of the same verb va-yehi ("it was").
• va-ya'er ("it lit up", H0215) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb; the causative stem indicates the subject caused light to happen, distinct from a simple qal "was light."
• qarav ("drew near", H7126G) — qal perfect, marking a completed (non-)action: "did not draw near," describing the whole night as a finished state.
• zeh ... 'el zeh ("this ... to this", H2088 x2) — a doubled demonstrative used idiomatically to express reciprocity ("each other"), without a dedicated reciprocal pronoun in Hebrew.

What the text says

The clause structure moves through four narrative verbs joined by va ("and"): "it went" (va-yavo), "it was" (va-yehi), "it lit up" (va-ya'er), and then a shift to a negated perfect, "it did not draw near" (lo qarav). The first verb places the subject between (bein... u-vein, H0996G) the two camps, each expressed as a construct chain, "camp of Egypt" / "camp of Israel," using machaneh (H4264) in construct form both times.

The second clause, va-yehi he-'anan ve-ha-choshekh, joins "the cloud" and "the darkness" as a compound subject of a single verb "it was" — the grammar does not specify how cloud and darkness relate to each other (simultaneous presence, contrast, or single referent with two names), only that both are asserted as being present. The following verb, va-ya'er, is hiphil, marking a causative action — literally "it caused light" or "it lit up" — governing the direct object et ha-laylah ("the night", H3915) marked explicitly by the object marker 'et (H0853).

The final clause uses the perfect qarav preceded by lo ("not") to state a completed non-event across the whole night (kol ha-laylah, "all the night," H3605 in construct with H3915), and the reciprocal sense "did not draw near to each other" is built from the repeated demonstrative zeh... 'el zeh, a grammatical strategy in Hebrew for reciprocity rather than a single reciprocal pronoun.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the compound "the cloud and the darkness" (he-'anan ve-ha-choshekh) as skotos kai gnophos ("darkness and gloom"), omitting an explicit word for "cloud." Where the Hebrew has the hiphil "it lit up the night" (va-ya'er et ha-laylah), the LXX reads diēlthen hē nyx, "the night passed," a different verb and image. The Vulgate instead merges both ideas into one continuous description, "nubes tenebrosa... illuminans noctem" ("a dark cloud... illuminating the night"), combining cloud, darkness, and light into a single sustained image not structured as two separate clauses as in the Hebrew.