Exodus 17:10

Summary

The verse reports that Joshua carried out the fighting against Amalek exactly as Moses had instructed him, while Moses, Aaron and Hur climbed to the top of the hill. The Hebrew presents two parallel but distinct actions: Joshua's engagement in the valley and the three men's ascent to a height overlooking it.

Key words

• va-Ya'as ("and he did", H6213A) — qal wayyiqtol (narrative past), the main sequential verb that opens the verse and moves the story forward.
• 'amar ("he had said", H0559) — qal perfect, expressing an action completed before the main narrative verb; it frames Joshua's action as fulfillment of a prior instruction.
• le-hillachem ("to fight/in fighting", H3898A) — niphal infinitive construct with the preposition le, giving the purpose or content of Joshua's action; the niphal stem conveys mutual/reciprocal engagement in combat rather than a simple active strike.
• 'alu ("they went up", H5927G) — qal perfect, 3rd person plural, describing the parallel completed action of Moses, Aaron and Hur.
• rosh ("top of", H7218I) — masculine singular noun in construct state, bound to ha-giv'ah ("the hill", H1389I) to form the phrase "head/top of the hill."

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative verb va-Ya'as ("and he did"), whose subject is Yehoshua ("Joshua", H3091G). The clause ka'asher 'amar-lo Mosheh ("just as Moses had said to him") uses the perfect 'amar to mark an action anterior to Joshua's doing — a background statement rather than a new event in the sequence. The phrase lo ("to him", H9033+H9005) precedes the explicit subject Mosheh, a common Hebrew word order where the pronominal object appears before the noun it anticipates.

Joshua's action is then specified by the infinitive construct le-hillachem ba-'Amalek ("to fight against Amalek"), syntactically dependent on va-Ya'as — grammatically, Joshua "did... to fight," making the combat the content or purpose of his action rather than a separate finite verb.

The second half of the verse shifts subject with the conjunction u- ("and") introducing Mosheh, 'Aharon ve-Chur, followed by the plural perfect 'alu ("they went up") and the construct phrase rosh ha-giv'ah ("top of the hill"), literally "head of the hill," describing the specific point they reached.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew infinitive construct le-hillachem ("to fight," dependent on "did") with a separate finite verb, ἐξελθὼν παρετάξατο ("having gone out, he arrayed for battle"), turning one grammatically subordinate action into two independent verbs. The Vulgate similarly uses a coordinated finite verb, pugnavit ("he fought"), alongside fecit ("he did"), rather than preserving the purpose/infinitive relationship found in the Hebrew construction 'asah...le-hillachem.