Exodus 19:21

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to descend and warn the people not to force their way toward Yehovah in order to see him, adding that if they do so, a great number of them will die. The verse is built as a direct divine command followed by a warning clause explaining the danger.

Key words

• red ("go down", H3381) — qal imperative, second person masculine singular; a bare command to Moses with no object marker, simply "descend."
• ha'Ed ("warn", H5749B) — hiphil (causative) imperative; the causative stem indicates Moses is to cause the people to be warned, not merely speak to them informally.
• yeherSu ("they should break through", H2040) — qal imperfect, third person masculine plural, governed by the particle pen ("lest", H6435); the imperfect here expresses a feared potential future action, not a completed one.
• li-r'ot ("to see", H7200G) — qal infinitive with prefixed li ("to"); expresses purpose, i.e., the goal of the feared "breaking through."
• naFal ("it will fall", H5307J) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), third person masculine singular; despite being grammatically "perfect," in this construction it continues the future/potential sense of the preceding clause, describing a consequence that would follow.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the standard narrative formula va-yomer Yehovah 'el-Mosheh ("and Yehovah said to Moses"), introducing direct speech. The core command consists of two stacked imperatives, red ("go down") and ha'Ed ("warn"), both addressed to Moses in the second person masculine singular, with ba-'am ("in/among the people") marking the object of the warning through a preposition plus noun rather than a direct object marker.

The warning itself is structured around the particle pen ("lest"), which introduces a subordinate clause of feared consequence. The verb yeherSu ("they should break through") is imperfect, expressing an unrealized but possible action; it is followed by 'el-Yehovah ("to/toward Yehovah") and the infinitive li-r'ot ("to see"), which together indicate the people's imagined goal — pressing toward Yehovah in order to see him. The clause continues with a vav-consecutive perfect, ve-nafal ... rav ("and many will fall/die"), where rav ("many", H7227A) functions as the grammatical subject of nafal ("it will fall/die"), and the pronominal suffix on mimmenu ("from him/it") specifies that this "many" comes from among the people.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the divine name as ho theos ("the God") where the Hebrew has Yehovah (H3068G), and describes the people's action with engisōsin ("approach") and katanoēsai ("to perceive/observe") rather than the Hebrew's yeherSu ("break through") and li-r'ot ("to see"). The Vulgate introduces the noun terminos ("boundaries/limits") — "transcendere terminos" ("to cross the boundaries") — a spatial concept not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew clause, which uses only the verb yeherSu ("break through") without an explicit noun for a boundary.