Exodus 15:12

Summary

The verse describes an action performed with the right hand, followed by the earth swallowing the enemies. The Hebrew presents a two-part poetic line: the divine right hand is stretched out, and the earth performs the act of swallowing.

Key words

• na.Ti.ta ("you stretched out", H5186) — qal perfect, 2nd person masculine singular. The perfect aspect marks this as a completed action, describing the stretching out of the hand as an accomplished fact.
• ye.Mi.ne.kha ("your right [hand]", H3225G) — feminine singular noun in construct form with the pronominal suffix kha ("your"). The construct state links it directly to the following possessive, producing "your right hand."
• tiv.la.'E.mo ("it swallowed them", H1104) — qal imperfect, 3rd person feminine singular, with the object suffix mo ("them", masculine plural). The subject is feminine to agree with 'A.retz ("earth"), the grammatical subject that follows.
• 'A.retz ("earth", H0776H) — feminine singular noun, standing as the subject of tiv.la.'E.mo, though it appears after the verb, which is common in Biblical Hebrew verb-subject word order.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause divides into two poetic halves. In the first, na.Ti.ta ("you stretched out") governs the object ye.Mi.ne.kha ("your right hand"), forming a complete statement in the perfect aspect: a finished act of extension. In the second half, the verb tiv.la.'E.mo is in the imperfect, which typically marks incomplete, ongoing, or future action, yet here it functions within a poetic narrative describing a past event — a feature of Hebrew poetic style where imperfect verb forms can carry narrative past sense in parallel with perfect forms.

The word order in the second clause is verb-subject: tiv.la.'E.mo ("it swallowed them") precedes 'A.retz ("earth"), its grammatical subject. The verb's feminine singular form agrees with 'A.retz, which is grammatically feminine, and the suffix -mo on the verb carries the object "them," referring to the group swallowed. This yields a literal structure of "swallowed-them earth," inverted relative to the expected subject-verb-object order familiar from prose.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders ye.Mi.ne.kha ("your right [hand]") with the general term manum tuam ("your hand"), without the specific notion of "right" that the Hebrew yemin conveys. The Septuagint (Swete text as given) reads τὴν δεξιάν σου ("your right [hand]") matching the Hebrew's specificity, but the clause αὐτοὺς γῆ ("them, earth") lacks an explicit verb corresponding to tiv.la.'E.mo ("swallowed"), differing structurally from both the Hebrew and the Vulgate's devoravit eos terra ("the earth devoured them"), which supplies a finite verb.