Exodus 18:8

Summary

Moses tells his father-in-law everything Yehovah did to Pharaoh and Egypt for Israel's sake, including all the hardship they encountered on the journey and how Yehovah delivered them from it.

Key words

• yesapper ("he recounted", H5608A) — piel narrative form; the intensive stem marks a full, detailed retelling rather than a brief mention.
• choteno ("his father-in-law", H2859A) — qal participle construct with pronominal suffix; identifies Jethro by relationship to Moses, "the one who is father-in-law of him."
• 'asah ("he had done", H6213A) — qal perfect, marking completed action prior to the moment of speaking; frames what Yehovah accomplished as already finished.
• metza'atam ("it had come upon them", H4672) — qal perfect, feminine subject (tela'ah, "hardship") acting upon "them"; the hardship is grammatically the subject that "found" or "befell" the people.
• yatzillem ("he had delivered them", H5337) — hiphil (causative) narrative form; the causative stem stresses Yehovah as active agent causing the rescue, not merely that deliverance happened.

What the text says

The verse is built around a single main verb, yesapper ("he recounted", H5608A), governing three parallel objects marked by the direct object particle 'et (H0853): "all that Yehovah had done to Pharaoh and to Egypt" (lines 7–16), "all the hardship that had come upon them on the journey" (lines 20–28), and the concluding clause introduced by the narrative va- on yatzillem ("and he delivered them", H5337). This threefold structure lets Moses' report cover three distinct temporal layers: Yehovah's past actions against Egypt, the hardship endured by the people, and the deliverance that resolved it — all recounted as completed events using the qal perfect forms 'asah (H6213A) and metza'atam (H4672).

Grammatically notable is that the hardship itself, tela'ah ("hardship", H8513), is the grammatical subject of metza'atam ("it had come upon them", H4672) — the hardship "found" or "befell" the people, rather than the people simply "experiencing" it. This is a common Biblical Hebrew idiom where negative circumstances are cast as an active subject reaching the affected party. The final clause returns focus to Yehovah (H3068G) as subject of the hiphil verb yatzillem ("he delivered them", H5337), closing the report with Yehovah as the one who causes the rescue, paralleling the earlier statement that Yehovah is the one who "did" ('asah) the acts against Egypt.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causes/reason clause with ἕνεκεν τοῦ ("because of/for the sake of") similarly to the Hebrew 'al 'odot ("on account of", H0182+H5921A), but structures the deliverance clause differently: it reads ὅτι ἐξείλατο αὐτοὺς κύριος ἐκ χειρὸς Φαραὼ καὶ ἐκ χειρὸς τῶν Αἰγυπτίων ("that the Lord delivered them from the hand of Pharaoh and from the hand of the Egyptians"), adding an explicit "from the hand of Pharaoh and Egyptians" not present in the Hebrew text as given, where the deliverance clause simply states va-yatzillem Yehovah ("and Yehovah delivered them", H5337+H3068G) without specifying "from the hand of."