Exodus 19:1

Summary

The verse marks a temporal and spatial transition: it dates the arrival of the Israelites at a specific point after leaving Egypt — "in the third month" from the exodus — and states that "on this day" they reached the wilderness of Sinai.

Key words

• Cho.desh ("month", H2320) — masculine singular noun, here governed by the ordinal she.li.Shi ("third", H7992), giving the calendrical marker for the event.
• Tzet ("going out", H3318) — qal infinitive construct, preceded by the preposition le ("of/to"); this infinitive construction functions as a temporal clause, "at the going-out of," dating the third month relative to the departure from Egypt rather than naming a fixed calendar month independently.
• Zeh ("this", H2088) — demonstrative particle modifying Yom ("day", H3117), forming "this day," a phrase whose referent (the day of departure or the day of arrival) is grammatically ambiguous in Hebrew.
• Ba.'u ("they came", H0935) — qal perfect, third person plural, marking a completed action; the subject (the people of Israel) is carried over from the earlier construct chain rather than restated.
• mid.Bar ("wilderness of", H4057) — masculine singular noun in construct state with Si.Nai ("Sinai", H5514), functioning here as the direct object of motion for Ba.'u without an intervening preposition "to" in the Hebrew text.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of temporal specifications preceding the main verb. It opens with ba-Cho.desh ha-she.li.Shi ("in the third month"), then qualifies which month by the infinitive clause le-Tzet be.nei-Yis.ra.'El me-'E.retz Mitz.Ra.yim ("at the going-out of the sons of Israel from the land of Egypt") — a construction that dates events relative to the exodus rather than to an absolute calendar. The phrase ba-Yom ha-Zeh ("on this day") is added before the main verb Ba.'u ("they came"), but Hebrew does not specify whether "this day" is the same day of the month as the departure or the day of arrival at Sinai itself — both readings are grammatically possible from the construct chain alone. The final clause places the verb Ba.'u directly before mid.Bar Si.Nai without a preposition of motion, treating "wilderness of Sinai" as the goal reached.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate ("in die hac venerunt") and RV1909 ("en aquel día vinieron") preserve the ambiguity of ba-Yom ha-Zeh as referring to the day of arrival. BSB resolves the ambiguity explicitly as "the same day of the month" that they had left Egypt, an interpretive choice not settled by the Hebrew syntax alone. The provided LXX text renders the genealogical/geographical phrase as τῆς ἐξόδου τῶν υἱῶν Αἰγύπτου ("of the exodus of the sons of Egypt"), lacking the explicit mention of Ἰσραήλ ("Israel") and the phrase "from the land of" found in the Hebrew me-'E.retz Mitz.Ra.yim.