Exodus 16:3

Summary

The Israelites complain to Moses and Aaron, expressing a wish that they had died in Egypt "by the hand of Yehovah" rather than face death by hunger in the wilderness. They contrast their past situation of eating meat and bread to satiety in Egypt with their present circumstances, accusing their leaders of bringing the whole assembly out only to kill them with famine.

Key words

• mi ("who?", H4310) + yitten ("will he give", H5414Q) — this interrogative-verb combination forms a fixed idiomatic construction expressing a wish or longing, roughly "who would grant that...", conventionally rendered "would that" or "if only."
• mutenu ("died", H4191) — a qal infinitive with a 1st person plural suffix ("our dying"), functioning as the object of yitten: literally "who would give our dying," i.e., "would that we had died."
• yad-YHWH ("hand of Yehovah", H3027H/H3068G) — a construct chain identifying the agent or means; the people frame their hypothetical death in Egypt as coming directly from Yehovah, distinct from the famine they now fear.
• hotzetem ("you have brought out", H3318H) — hiphil (causative) perfect, 2nd person masculine plural: a completed causative action, "you caused [us] to go out," placing responsibility for the exodus explicitly on the addressees (Moses and Aaron).
• qahal ("assembly", H6951) — masculine singular noun with definite article and demonstrative ha-zeh ("this"), referring to the whole gathered community as a single collective body facing the same threat.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative va-yomru ("and they said", H0559), introducing direct speech from bene Yisra'el ("sons/people of Israel", H1121G/H3478). The core of the complaint is built on a Hebrew idiom, mi-yitten + infinitive, which does not translate word-for-word into other languages: it literally asks "who will give" but functions as a wish-formula. The infinitive mutenu ("our dying") extends this into "who would give our dying by the hand of Yehovah" — a construction that frames the wished-for death as something granted or caused by Yehovah specifically, using yad ("hand", H3027H) as an instrument of action.

The subsequent clauses use paired infinitives with the preposition be ("when/in", H9003): be-shivtenu ("in our sitting", H3427) and be-akhlenu ("in our eating", H0398), both governed by pronominal suffixes ("our"), describing repeated or general past circumstances rather than single events — a nuance infinitives with prepositions convey more compactly than finite past tenses. The clause introduced by ki (H3588A, here functioning as "for/because") shifts to a hiphil perfect, hotzetem, marking a completed causative action attributed to the addressees, followed by another purpose infinitive, le-hamit ("to cause to die", H4191 in hiphil), which mirrors the earlier mutenu but now with causative force — the difference between wishing to die (qal) and being caused to die by others (hiphil).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the mi-yitten muteinu idiom as a direct statement, apethanomen plēgentes ("we died, having been struck"), replacing the Hebrew wish-construction with a completed indicative verb plus a participle ("struck"), which is not present in the Hebrew. The Vulgate uses utinam mortui essemus ("would that we had died"), preserving the optative/wish sense more closely to the Hebrew idiom than the LXX does.