Exodus 15:16

Summary

The verse describes terror and dread falling upon unnamed enemies, who become as still as stone, while Yehovah's people cross over — described both as "your people" and as "the people you have acquired." The passage uses parallel imperfect verb forms bracketing a shift to a single perfect verb at the end.

Key words

• tippol ("it has fallen", H5307G) — qal imperfect, feminine singular, agreeing with the feminine noun eimatah that follows it; despite the imperfect (non-completed) aspect, the gloss given renders it as a past/resultative sense.
• eimatah ("terror", H0367) and pachad ("dread", H6343) — a fem./masc. noun pair joined by va ("and", H9002), forming a doubled subject for the single verb tippol.
• g'dol...zeroa'kha — a double construct chain: g'dol ("greatness of", H1419A, construct form) governs zeroa' ("strength/arm", H2220, also construct), which itself takes the suffix -kha ("your", H9021), yielding a compact phrase built without any explicit preposition of possession.
• yiddemu ("they have become still", H1826A) — qal imperfect, third person plural, describing the enemies' immobility, matched with the comparison ka'aven ("like the stone", H0068G + article).
• qanita ("you have bought/acquired", H7069) — qal perfect, second person masculine singular, the only completed-aspect verb in the verse, closing the sentence after a series of imperfects.

What the text says

The verse opens with a feminine singular verb, tippol, carrying a compound subject (eimatah "terror" and pachad "dread"), a common construction in Biblical Hebrew where the verb agrees with the nearer or leading noun rather than being pluralized for both. The phrase bigdol zeroa'kha stacks two construct nouns before reaching the pronominal suffix, a chain that in English requires the periphrastic "by the greatness of the strength of your arm." The verb yiddemu ("they have become still") is followed by the comparative ka'aven ("like the stone"), using the noun "stone" without repetition of a verb "to be," a normal comparative structure in Hebrew.

The final two clauses are structured identically: 'ad ("until", H5704) + ya'avor ("it has passed by", H5674A) + 'am'kha / 'am zu ("your people" / "the people which..."). The second clause replaces the possessive suffix with the relative particle zu ("which", H2098), followed by qanita, a perfect-aspect verb — the only verb in the verse not in the imperfect. This shift from repeated imperfects to a single perfect marks the acquiring of the people as a completed event, distinct from the ongoing or repeated imperfect actions of falling, stilling, and passing.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tippol with the optative ἐπιπέσοι ("may it fall"), and the Vulgate uses the subjunctive-like Irruat ("let it rush upon"), both expressing wish/petition, where the Hebrew simply uses an imperfect verb without an overt jussive marker. For qanita, the LXX gives ἐκτήσω ("acquired"), the Vulgate possedisti ("possessed"), while RV1909 translates "rescataste" ("redeemed") — a semantic divergence from the more literal "bought/acquired" sense of H7069 shown in the word-by-word gloss.