Exodus 18:7

Summary

Moses goes out to meet his father-in-law, bows down and kisses him, and the two men exchange greetings about each other's well-being before entering the tent together. The verse describes a sequence of customary gestures of welcome between kinsmen.

Key words

• va-yeitze ("and he went out", H3318G) — narrative vav + qal verb, marking the first action in the sequence: Moses' departure to meet his relative.
• choteno ("his father-in-law", H2859A) — qal participle in construct with the suffix -o ("his"), literally "the one who is his father-in-law," attached to Moses.
• va-yishtachu ("and he bowed down", H7812) — hishtaphel narrative form, denoting the physical act of prostration as part of the greeting sequence.
• va-yishaq-lo ("and he kissed him", H5401A) — qal narrative verb with the preposition le + suffix -o ("to him"), indicating the kiss is directed toward the father-in-law.
• ish le-re'ehu ("each to his companion/neighbor", H0376I + H7453) — a distributive construction: ish ("each") paired with re'ehu ("his companion," construct + suffix), expressing mutual, reciprocal action between the two men.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — va-yeitze, va-yishtachu, va-yishaq, va-yish'alu, va-yavo'u — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which strings the actions together in temporal sequence: Moses went out, then bowed, then kissed, then they asked, then they went in. This chain structure is a hallmark of Biblical Hebrew narrative prose, presenting the scene as one continuous, connected event rather than isolated actions.

The phrase ish le-re'ehu le-shalom ("each to his companion, concerning welfare/peace") uses a distributive idiom, ish...re'ehu, to express reciprocity: the subject of the plural verb va-yish'alu ("they asked") is broken down into "each one to his companion," making explicit that the questioning went both directions. The noun shalom (H7965I) here functions as the topic of the inquiry — the state of wellbeing or peace of one another — rather than a greeting formula by itself; the preposition le frames it as "asking about/for" welfare.

The final verb va-yavo'u ("and they went") is followed by ha-ohela ("the tent," H0168G) with a directional he suffix (H9011), indicating movement "toward" or "into" the tent, marking the closing action of the sequence.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va-yish'alu ish le-re'ehu le-shalom as ἠσπάσαντο ἀλλήλους ("they greeted/embraced one another"), condensing the Hebrew's explicit "asking about welfare" into a general term for mutual greeting, without preserving the distributive ish...re'ehu construction. The Vulgate similarly renders it as salutaverunt se mutuo verbis pacificis ("they greeted each other mutually with peaceful words"), interpreting shalom as manifested in "peaceful words" rather than as the object of inquiry. Both the LXX (εἰσήγαγεν, "he brought/led in") and Vulgate (intrasset, "he had entered") shift the final verb's grammatical subject compared to the Hebrew va-yavo'u ("and they went"), which is plural in the Hebrew text.