Exodus 19:14

Summary

Moses descends from the mountain to the people, consecrates them, and the people wash their clothes. The verse narrates three sequential actions using Hebrew's standard narrative chain, moving the story forward from the divine instructions given earlier to their execution.

Key words

• i.Ye.red ("he went down", H3381) — qal narrative verb; simple stem indicates plain, non-intensive action of descending.
• y.ka.Desh ("he consecrated", H6942G) — piel narrative verb; the piel (intensive) stem marks this as a causative/intensive action — Moses actively makes the people consecrated, not merely describing a state.
• y.kha.be.Su ("they washed", H3526H) — piel narrative verb, plural subject; again intensive stem, and the shift to plural marks the people as agents of this action, distinct from Moses's singular actions.
• sim.lo.Ta ("clothes", H8071) — feminine plural noun in construct state ("clothes of"), bound to the following suffix.
• m ("their", H9028) — pronominal suffix attached to sim.lo.Ta, completing the construct phrase as "their clothes."

What the text says

The verse is built on three consecutive narrative verbs joined by the vav-consecutive (va, H9001), each marked "and then...": Moses went down (i.Ye.red), Moses consecrated (y.ka.Desh), and the people washed (y.kha.be.Su). This chain structure presents the actions as a sequence of discrete, completed events rather than simultaneous or overlapping ones.

A grammatical distinction worth noting is the stem alternation: i.Ye.red is qal (basic stem), while y.ka.Desh and y.kha.be.Su are both piel (intensive/factitive stem). The piel in y.ka.Desh casts Moses's action as causative — he brings about a state of consecration in the people (marked by the direct object marker 'et, H0853, before ha-'Am, "the people"). The piel in y.kha.be.Su similarly intensifies "washing" beyond a simple qal sense, though here the grammatical subject shifts to third-person plural ("they"), referring to the people who had just been consecrated.

The final phrase, sim.lo.Ta-m ("clothes of-them"), uses the construct chain typical of Hebrew possessive expressions, without a separate possessive word.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text repeats ha-'Am ("the people", H5971A) explicitly as the object of y.ka.Desh ("he consecrated"). The LXX uses the pronoun αὐτούς ("them") instead of repeating "the people," and the Vulgate similarly uses eum ("it/him," referring back to populum). The SBLIBRE rendering "les ordenó purificarse" ("he ordered them to purify themselves") interprets y.ka.Desh as a command to self-purify rather than as Moses directly performing the consecrating action, a nuance not explicit in the Hebrew verb form itself, which places Moses as the grammatical subject of the piel verb.