Exodus 14:28

Summary

The waters return to their place and cover the chariots, horsemen, and the entire army of Pharaoh that had entered the sea after the Israelites. The text closes with the emphatic statement that not a single one of them survived.

Key words

• va-yaShuvu ("and they returned", H7725G) — qal narrative verb, marks the sequential action of the waters going back to their former position.
• va-ykhaSu ("and they covered", H3680) — piel narrative verb; the piel stem intensifies the action, suggesting a thorough or complete covering rather than a partial one.
• ha-baIm ("the ones who had gone", H0935G) — qal participle, masculine plural, describing the army as those "in the state of having entered" after the Israelites; the participle frames the army's action as an ongoing or characterizing description rather than a single completed event.
• nish'Ar ("it remained/was left", H7604) — niphal perfect; the niphal (passive/reflexive) stem indicates that no remnant "was left," expressed impersonally.
• 'ad-'eChad ("up to one", H5704 + H0259) — a construction using "up to" plus the numeral "one," producing the idiomatic sense "not even a single one."

What the text says

The verse is built on two paired narrative (vav-consecutive) clauses: va-yaShuvu ha-Mayim ("and the waters returned") and va-ykhaSu... et-ha-Rekhev ve-et-ha-Parashim ("and they covered... the chariot[s] and the horsemen"). Both objects — Rekhev ("chariot", H7393G) and Parashim ("horsemen", H6571B) — are marked with the direct object particle 'et (H0853), which is untranslated but signals that these nouns are the grammatical objects of the covering action. The phrase le-khol cheil Par'oh ("to all the army of Pharaoh") uses a construct chain (khol... cheil..., "all of... army of...") to specify that the chariots and horsemen belong to, or constitute, "the whole army of Pharaoh."

The relative-like participle ha-baIm 'achareihem ba-Yam ("the ones who had gone after them into the sea") modifies this army, describing it not with a finite past-tense verb but with a participial form that in Hebrew often carries a durative or characterizing nuance — "those who were entering/had entered."

The final clause, lo-nish'ar bahem 'ad-'echad, uses the niphal perfect nish'ar ("it remained") negated by lo ("not"), followed by the idiom 'ad-'echad ("up to one"). This construction expresses totality of loss impersonally: literally "there was not left among them, up to one," i.e., no remainder existed even down to a single individual.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew's two-part construct phrase ("chariot... horsemen... all the army of Pharaoh") with a parallel list (ἅρματα, ἀναβάτας, πᾶσαν τὴν δύναμιν), matching the Hebrew structure closely. Where the Hebrew participle ha-baIm ("the ones who had gone") is a participial description, the LXX uses a perfect participle (τοὺς εἰσπεπορευμένους), and the Vulgate uses a relative clause with pluperfect ("qui... ingressi fuerant"), both converting the Hebrew's participial construction into more explicitly tensed forms. The BSB and SBLIBRE additionally insert "the Israelites" as the object of pursuit, a clarification not explicit in the Hebrew text, which only has the third-person suffix 'achareihem ("after them", H0310A + H9038).