Exodus 19:16

Summary

Exodus 19:16 describes the events on the third day at Mount Sinai: at morning, thunder, lightning, and a heavy cloud appeared on the mountain, along with an extremely loud sound of a ram's horn, causing all the people in the camp to tremble.

Key words

• va-y'hi ("and it was", H1961) — qal narrative form (vayyiqtol) with narrative vav, used twice in this verse (positions 2 and 12) to mark successive plot developments: "and it came to pass... and it came to pass."
• qolot ("thunder claps"/"voices", H6963I) — feminine plural noun; the same root (H6963) reappears later in construct form qol ("sound of", H6963H) governing shofar ("ram's horn", H7782), creating a wordplay between the plural "thunders/sounds" (qolot) and the singular "sound of" the horn.
• be-heyot ("when it came to be", H1961) — infinitive construct with prefixed preposition bi ("when", H9003), forming a temporal clause "when the morning came," distinct from the main narrative verb form.
• kaved ("heavy", H3515) — masculine singular adjective modifying 'anan ("a cloud", H6051), describing the cloud's density directly on the mountain ('al ha-har, "on the mountain", H5921A + H2022G).
• yecherad ("it trembled", H2729) — qal narrative (vayyiqtol) verb, third-person masculine singular, with the subject kol ha-'am ("all the people", H3605 construct + H5971A) following it — the standard verb-subject word order of Biblical Hebrew narrative.

What the text says

The verse opens with two instances of va-y'hi (H1961), a narrative construction that frames temporal settings before introducing new action. The first va-y'hi sets up "the third day" (ba-yom ha-shelishi), further specified by the infinitive clause bi-heyot ha-boker ("when the morning came"). The second va-y'hi then introduces the list of phenomena: qolot ("thunder claps", plural), u-vraqim ("and lightnings", plural, H1300B), and ve-'anan kaved ("and a heavy cloud", singular with adjective). This shift from plural nouns to a singular cloud, followed by a construct phrase qol shofar chazaq me'od ("the sound of a ram's horn, very strong"), builds a sequence of sensory descriptions before the main clause resolves in va-yecherad kol ha-'am ("and all the people trembled").

The construct chain qol shofar (H6963H + H7782) is grammatically distinct from the earlier plural qolot (H6963I) despite sharing the same root — the Hebrew text uses the same lexical root for both "thunder(s)" and "the sound of" the horn, a repetition not always preserved in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX specifies the mountain as Σεινά ("Sinai"), a name absent in this Hebrew verse, which reads only ha-har ("the mountain", H2022G) with the definite article, not a proper name. The LXX also renders the people's reaction as ἐπτοήθη ("was terrified/startled"), while the Hebrew yecherad (H2729) denotes trembling/quaking; the Vulgate's timuit ("feared") likewise shifts toward fear-vocabulary rather than physical trembling.