Exodus 17:5

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to go ahead of the people, to bring some of the elders of Israel with him, and to take in his hand the staff with which he had struck the Nile, then to proceed. The verse is a direct divine command consisting of a chain of imperatives followed by a sequential form indicating the resulting action.

Key words

• 'a.Vor ("pass on", H5674A) — qal imperative, second person masculine singular; opens the command chain.
• li.f.Nei ("before", H6440G, construct plural of panim) — construct form meaning literally "to the face of," used with ha.'Am ("the people", H5971A) to mean "ahead of the people."
• zik.Nei ("elders of", H2205G) — masculine plural construct, linked to Yisra'El ("Israel", H3478), naming the group Moses is to bring.
• hi.Ki.ta ("you struck", H5221) — hiphil perfect, second person masculine singular; the hiphil stem marks a causative action ("you caused a striking"), and the perfect indicates a completed past event relative to the command being given now.
• ha.La.khe.ta ("you will go", H1980G) — sequential (waw-consecutive) perfect; grammatically it continues the string of imperatives as the final step of the sequence, functioning as "and go."

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) introducing direct speech from Yehovah (H3068G) to Mosheh (H4872). The command itself is built from three imperatives in sequence: 'a.Vor ("pass on"), Kach ("take", H3947G, repeated twice), and finally the sequential perfect ha.La.khe.ta ("and you will go"), which in Biblical Hebrew syntax continues the force of the preceding imperatives rather than introducing a separate future statement.

The phrase mi.zik.Nei Yisra'El ("some of the elders of Israel") uses the preposition mi ("some of", H9006) with the construct zik.Nei to indicate a partitive selection — not all the elders, but a subset. The object clause describing the staff is marked by the relative particle 'a.Sher ("which", H0834A) and the hiphil perfective hi.Ki.ta ("you struck"), which grammatically frames the striking of the ha.y'Or ("the River", H2975G) as a completed prior event, distinguishing it temporally from the imperatives being issued now.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the command "πρὸς Μωυσῆν" and paraphrases 'a.Vor ("pass on") with "προπορεύου τοῦ λαοῦ τούτου" ("go before this people"), inserting a demonstrative "this" not present in the Hebrew ha.'Am ("the people", simple definite article). The Vulgate's "Antecede populum" similarly renders the imperative but drops the prepositional phrase's literal "before the face of" found in li.f.Nei. The Hebrew names the river as ha.y'Or ("the River", a generic term often used for the Nile in Egyptian context), while the LXX gives "τὸν ποταμόν" and the SBLIBRE Spanish translation specifies "el río Nilo," making explicit an identification not lexically stated in the Hebrew term itself.