Exodus 17:9

Summary

Moses instructs Joshua to select men and go fight against Amalek, while Moses himself states he will stand the next day on top of a hill holding the staff of God. The verse is structured as direct speech containing two imperatives to Joshua and a first-person statement about Moses' own position and action.

Key words

• bechar ("choose", H0977) — qal imperative, 2nd person masculine singular, addressed directly to Joshua.
• tze' ("go out", H3318) — qal imperative; paired with the next verb to form a single command sequence.
• hillachem ("fight", H3898) — niphal imperative; the niphal stem here carries a reciprocal/reflexive sense ("engage in battle") rather than a simple active "strike."
• nitzav ("standing", H5324) — niphal participle, masculine singular; describes Moses' ongoing/future position, not a punctual act but a sustained stance.
• matteh ("staff of", H4294) — masculine singular construct, linked to ha'elohim ("the God", H0430) to form the phrase "staff of God," marking possession/association rather than mere description.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula vayomer ("and he said", H0559) introducing Moses' speech to Joshua. The core of the command consists of two imperatives in sequence — bechar ("choose") and tze' ("go out") — followed by hillachem ("fight"), also imperative but in the niphal stem, which in Biblical Hebrew regularly expresses mutual engagement in combat rather than a one-sided strike. The object of the fighting is marked with the preposition ba ("against", H9003) attached to Amalek (H6002), the adversary's name.

The second half of the verse shifts to Moses speaking about himself. The pronoun anokhi ("I", H0595) is followed by the niphal participle nitzav ("standing", H5324), a construction that in Hebrew narrative often signals a state that will hold continuously into the future — here, tomorrow (machar, H4279). The final clause, "u-matteh ha'elohim be-yadi" ("and the staff of the God [will be] in my hand"), is a verbless nominal clause; Hebrew supplies no explicit verb "to be," so the sense of futurity is carried only by the preceding time word machar and context, not by verbal morphology.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders anashim ("men", H0582) as "ἄνδρας δυνατούς" ("able/mighty men"), adding a qualifier ("mighty") absent from the Hebrew text, which simply says "men for us." The LXX also inserts "καὶ ἰδοὺ" ("and behold") before "ἐγὼ ἕστηκα" ("I stand"), a discourse marker not present in the Hebrew anokhi nitzav. The Vulgate turns the Hebrew's verbless final clause into a participial construction, "habens virgam Dei in manu mea" ("having the staff of God in my hand"), supplying a participle where the Hebrew has no verb at all.