Exodus 16:13

Summary

The verse describes two time-markers, evening and morning, each introducing a natural event: quail rising to cover the camp at evening, and a layer of dew appearing around the camp at morning. The sentence is built as two parallel temporal clauses connected by narrative sequence.

Key words

• vayehi ("it was", H1961) — qal narrative form of "to be," opens the first temporal clause ("and it was in the evening..."), a standard formula introducing a new narrative moment.
• ta'al ("it came up", H5927G) — qal narrative (wayyiqtol) form, feminine, agreeing with selav ("quail"); continues the narrative chain begun by vayehi.
• tekhas ("it covered", H3680) — piel narrative form, an intensive stem, feminine, describing the quail's action of covering the camp completely.
• shikhvat ("layer of", H7902) — feminine singular construct noun, meaning it must be followed by another noun ("layer of X"); here linked to tal ("dew", H2919), forming "layer of dew."
• hayetah ("it was", H1961) — qal perfect (not narrative wayyiqtol) form of "to be," feminine, agreeing with shikhvat; marks a shift in verbal form from the preceding narrative chain.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides into two halves joined by the conjunction u ("and", H9002) before va-boqer ("in the morning"). The first half uses the standard narrative chain: vayehi ("it was") + va-'erev ("in the evening") introduces the scene, followed by two wayyiqtol verbs, ta'al ("it came up") and tekhas ("it covered"), both feminine to agree with ha-selav ("the quail", H7958), a feminine singular noun despite referring to what may be a collective bird population. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before ha-machaneh ("the camp", H4264) marks the camp as the object being covered.

The second half shifts verbal form: instead of continuing the wayyiqtol narrative chain, the text uses hayetah ("it was"), a qal perfect. This grammatical shift — from narrative wayyiqtol to perfect — sets apart the morning event syntactically from the evening event, even though both are rendered "it was" in English. The construct phrase shikhvat ha-tal ("layer of the dew") functions as the subject of hayetah, meaning literally "a layer of the dew was, surrounding, to the camp." The word saviv ("around", H5439G) and the preposition-plus-article la-machaneh ("to the camp", H9005+H4264) together locate the dew-layer spatially around the camp, paralleling 'et-ha-machaneh in the first clause.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ha-selav with ortygomētra (a term for a type of quail/quail-mother), while the Vulgate uses coturnix ("quail"), both compatible with the Hebrew selav ("quail", H7958). The Vulgate's ros jacuit ("dew lay") interprets the Hebrew construct shikhvat ha-tal ("layer of the dew") as a verbal action ("lay") rather than preserving the noun-based "layer" construction found in the Hebrew and in the LXX's katapauomenēs tēs drosou ("the dew settling/resting").