Exodus 15:21

Summary

The verse describes Miriam responding to the people with a song, calling them to sing to Yehovah because he has triumphed decisively, throwing horse and rider into the sea. It functions as a refrain echoing the longer Song of the Sea sung earlier by Moses and the Israelites.

Key words

• Ta.'an ("she sang/answered", H6030C) — qal narrative verb, third person feminine, establishing Miriam as the grammatical subject of the action that follows.
• mir.Yam ("Miriam", H4813G) — proper name, feminine, identifying the singer explicitly by name after the verb.
• ga.'Oh ga.'Ah ("certainly exalted... he is exalted", H1342) — infinitive absolute followed by the perfect form of the same root; this doubling intensifies the verb, a construction Hebrew uses to stress certainty or high degree.
• ro.khe.V ("rider", H7392) — qal participle in construct form, meaning "the one riding," paired grammatically with sus ("horse", H5483M) to form a unit describing horse-and-rider together.
• ra.Mah ("he has thrown", H7411A) — qal perfect, third person masculine, denoting a completed action with Yehovah as the implied subject.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative vav attached to Ta.'an ("she sang", H6030C), marking a new narrated event: Miriam's response la.Hem ("to them", H9038) — the people. The subject mir.Yam ("Miriam", H4813G) follows the verb, a common Hebrew word order placing the verb first. Her speech begins with the imperative Shi.ru ("sing", H7891), addressed to a plural masculine audience, directed la.Yehovah ("to Yehovah", H3068G).

The causal clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A) explains the reason for singing: the doubled root ga.'Oh ga.'Ah (H1342) — infinitive absolute plus perfect — creates emphasis on the completeness or intensity of the exaltation, a grammatical feature that plain translation as "he is highly exalted" only partially conveys. The subject of this exaltation is sus ("horse", H5483M) joined by ve ("and", H9002) to ro.khe.vo ("its rider", H7392 + H9023), functioning as a construct pair — horse and its rider treated as a singular grammatical and conceptual unit. The final clause, ra.Mah va.Yam ("he has thrown... in the sea", H7411A + H3220G), uses the qal perfect to state a completed action, with the horse-and-rider unit as its object.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causal clause as ἐνδόξως γὰρ δεδόξασται ("for gloriously he has been glorified"), using a passive verb form where the Hebrew ga.'Oh ga.'Ah (H1342) employs an active infinitive-absolute-plus-perfect construction without a passive voice. The Vulgate's gloriose... magnificatus est similarly uses passive phrasing. Both the LXX and Vulgate render sus ve.ro.khe.vo (singular "horse and its rider") as singular objects (ἵππον καὶ ἀναβάτην, equum et ascensorem ejus), matching the Hebrew singular forms, though the SBLIBRE Spanish translation pluralizes them as "caballos" and "jinetes."