Exodus 16:8

Summary

Moses tells the Israelites that Yehovah will give them meat in the evening and bread in the morning, because Yehovah has heard their complaints. Moses adds that these complaints are not directed against him and Aaron, but against Yehovah himself.

Key words

• beTet ("giving/gives", H5414G) — preposition be ("when") + infinitive construct, forming a temporal clause: "when Yehovah gives."
• telunnoteikhem ("your grumblings", H8519) — feminine plural noun in construct form with pronominal suffix "your," repeated twice in the verse (once regarding Yehovah, once regarding Moses/Aaron).
• mallinim ("grumbling ones", H3885B) — hiphil (causative stem) participle, masculine plural, describing the people as those actively engaged in murmuring; the participle form marks an ongoing action/state rather than a single completed act.
• nachnu ("we", H5168) — independent personal pronoun "we," used emphatically alongside the rhetorical question mah ("what?", H4100), stressing the contrast between Moses/Aaron and Yehovah as the true object of complaint.
• bishmoa' ("because he has heard", H8085G) — preposition bi ("because") + infinitive construct, forming a causal clause explaining why Yehovah will provide food.

What the text says

The verse is built from a chain of infinitive-construct clauses governed by prepositions, a common feature of Biblical Hebrew narrative syntax. The temporal clause beTet Yehovah lakhem ba'erev basar le'ekhol ("when Yehovah gives to you in the evening meat to eat") uses beTet + infinitive to mark timing, followed by a second infinitive le'ekhol ("to eat") indicating purpose. The same pattern repeats with lechem babboqer lisboa' ("bread in the morning to be satisfied"), where lisboa' ("to be satisfied", H7646) is itself an infinitive expressing result or purpose.

The causal clause bishmoa' Yehovah et-telunnoteikhem ("because Yehovah has heard your grumblings") explains the reason for the provision, using the same infinitive-construct pattern with bi ("because"). The direct object marker 'et (H0853) precedes telunnoteikhem, marking it grammatically as the object heard, though it has no independent lexical meaning.

The second half of the verse pivots to a rhetorical structure: the independent pronoun nachnu ("we") combined with the interrogative mah ("what?") creates emphasis — Moses and Aaron are grammatically foregrounded as the (irrelevant) recipients of complaint, contrasted with Yehovah as the true target, marked by the preposition 'al ("against", H5921A) in both clauses: lo-'aleinu ("not against us") and ki 'al-Yehovah ("but against Yehovah"). The participle mallinim (hiphil, masculine plural) describes the people's continuous state of grumbling, distinct from a simple past-tense verb.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders mallinim ("grumbling ones", H3885B) with the verb diagongyzete ("you murmur"), shifting from the Hebrew participle (a nominal/adjectival form describing ongoing state) to a finite verb form. The Vulgate similarly uses murmurati estis ("you have murmured"), a perfect tense, rather than reflecting the participial aspect present in the Hebrew.