Exodus 16:20

Summary

Exodus 16:20 reports that some people ignored Moses's instruction concerning the manna, keeping a portion overnight instead of consuming it all on the same day as told. The leftover manna produced worms and began to smell, and Moses reacted with anger toward those responsible.

Key words

• sha.me.'U ("they listened", H8085G) — qal perfect, third person plural; combined with the negation lo' ("not", H3808), it states a completed failure to obey, not an ongoing refusal.
• yo.Ti.ru ("they left over", H3498) — hiphil (causative) narrative form; the causative stem indicates that the subjects actively caused manna to remain, rather than it remaining by itself.
• Ya.rum ("it became rotten" / "it bred", H7311B) — qal narrative form, third person singular, followed directly by tola'Im ("worms", H8438A) as its object/complement; the verb marks the onset of the infestation process itself.
• yiv.'Ash ("it stank", H0887) — qal narrative, continuing the chain of sequential events after the worm-breeding.
• yik.Tzof ("he was angry", H7107) — qal narrative; paired with the preposition 'a.le.Hem ("toward/against them", H5921A + H9038), forming the standard construction for directed anger.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of five narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — yo.Ti.ru, Ya.rum, yiv.'Ash, and yik.Tzof — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which in Biblical Hebrew links events sequentially: one action follows directly from the previous one. This chain creates a compressed cause-and-effect sequence: leaving manna overside leads to worm-breeding, which leads to stench, which leads to anger. The opening clause, ve-lo' shame'u 'el-Mosheh ("and they did not listen to Moses"), uses a perfect verb rather than a narrative form, setting up the background situation (disobedience) before the narrative chain of consequences begins.

The subject of yo.Ti.ru is 'anashim ("people/men", H0582), left grammatically unspecified as to number or identity beyond "some men" — the text does not name individuals. The phrase mi.Me.nu ("some of it", H4480A + H9033) uses the preposition min with a third-person singular suffix referring back to the manna, indicating a partial quantity, not the whole supply. The final clause places Moses's name at the very end of the sentence, after the verb and prepositional phrase, which is typical Hebrew word order when the subject is deferred for the sake of clause-final emphasis.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verb Ya.rum (H7311B) is rendered in the LXXSWETE as ἐξέζεσεν ("it boiled/swarmed forth") and in the Vulgate as scatere coepit ("it began to swarm/teem"), both of which frame the appearance of worms as an inceptive, almost visible eruption, whereas the English glosses given for the Hebrew ("it became rotten") emphasize decay rather than the onset of swarming.