Exodus 14:31

Summary

The verse states that Israel saw the "great hand" that Yehovah used against Egypt, and as a result the people feared Yehovah and believed in Yehovah and in Moses his servant. The sentence links perception, fear, and belief in a chain of three consecutive narrative verbs.

Key words

• va-yar ("and it saw", H7200G) — qal narrative verb, third person, opening the sequence: seeing is the triggering action.
• ha-yad ha-gedolah ("the great hand", H3027H + H1419A) — definite noun with definite adjective, both marked by ha (H9009); the article ties them together as a single fixed expression, the direct object of "saw" (marked by 'et, H0853).
• va-yire'u ("and they feared", H3372H) — qal narrative verb, third person plural, second link in the chain, with ha-'am ("the people", H5971A) as subject and 'et-YHWH as direct object.
• va-ya'aminu ("and they believed", H0539) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb, third person plural; the causative stem is used here for "to believe/trust," governed by the preposition ba- ("in", H9003) before YHWH and repeated before Mosheh.
• avdo ("his servant", H5650 + H9023) — noun in construct form with pronominal suffix, syntactically binding "servant" to Moses and, through parallel structure, to Yehovah.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of three narrative verbs joined by the vav consecutive (H9001): va-yar ("and it saw"), va-yire'u ("and they feared"), va-ya'aminu ("and they believed"). This chain presents the actions as sequential and causally connected within the narrative flow: seeing leads to fearing, which leads to believing. The subject of the first verb is Yisra'el (H3478), while the subject of the second and third verbs shifts to ha-'am ("the people", H5971A), though both refer to the same collective group in context.

The object of sight is ha-yad ha-gedolah ("the great hand"), a construct-like phrase where the article on both noun and adjective (H9009) marks it as a specific, identified referent — not just any hand, but the one already implied by the preceding narrative. The relative clause asher 'asah YHWH be-Mitsrayim ("which Yehovah had used/did in Egypt") uses the qal perfect 'asah (H6213A), indicating a completed action anterior to the seeing.

The final verb, ya'aminu ("they believed"), is in the hiphil stem, which grammatically marks causative or factitive action; here it is the standard stem for expressing "to believe/trust" and takes the preposition be- ("in") before both YHWH and Mosheh, syntactically placing Yehovah and Moses as parallel objects of the same verb of belief. The construct phrase avdo ("his servant") attaches directly to Mosheh, with the pronominal suffix -o ("his") referring back to Yehovah.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the sequence differently: it opens with eiden ("saw") governing tēn megalēn ("the great [thing]") without an explicit noun for "hand," and epoiēsen ("did/made") replaces the Hebrew 'asah as if referring to "which the Lord did to the Egyptians" (tois Aigyptiois) rather than the Hebrew's "in Egypt" (be-Mitsrayim, locative). The LXX also reads episteusan tō theō ("they believed the God") where the Hebrew has ba-YHWH ("in Yehovah"), substituting "God" for the divine name.

The Vulgate adds an element not present in the Hebrew word list given: viderunt Aegyptios mortuos super littus maris ("they saw the Egyptians dead upon the shore of the sea"), preceding the mention of "the great hand" (manum magnam), where the Hebrew text as given moves directly from "Israel saw" to "the great hand."