Exodus 19:24

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to go down from the mountain and then come back up together with Aaron, while priests and the general people are commanded not to force their way up to Yehovah's presence, under threat of a violent outbreak against them.

Key words

• lekh ("go", H1980) and red ("go down", H3381) — two consecutive imperative verbs (2nd person masculine singular) forming a compound command; Hebrew often stacks such verbs to give urgency or sequence to a single directive.
• 'alita ("you will come up", H5927) — a sequential (waw-consecutive) perfect, continuing the chain of commands begun by the imperatives; grammatically it reads as a further instruction rather than a simple future statement.
• yeherasu ("they break through", H2040) — qal jussive, 3rd person plural, preceded by the negation 'al ("may not", H0408); jussive + 'al forms a direct prohibition ("let them not…") rather than a flat negative statement.
• pen ("lest", H6435) — a subordinating particle introducing a negative purpose/result clause, linking the prohibition to its consequence.
• yifrotz ("he should break out", H6555) — qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular, expressing a potential or feared future action dependent on pen.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of divine speech introduced by va-yomer ("and he said", H0559), a standard narrative verb form marking a new turn in dialogue. The core instructions to Moses use two bare imperatives, lekh and red, which together function as a single compound command ("go down"). This is followed by ve-'alita, a sequential perfect that keeps the narrative moving forward: after going down, Moses is to come back up, this time together with Aaron ('atah ve-'aharon 'imakh, "you and Aaron with you").

The second half of the verse shifts to a separate audience — the priests (ha-kohanim, H3548) and the people (ha-'am, H5971) — introduced with the negative jussive 'al yeherasu, a direct prohibition against "breaking through" (H2040) to come up (la-'alot, infinitive of H5927, same root as 'alita) to Yehovah. The clause is closed by a pen + imperfect construction (pen-yifrotz bam), which expresses the feared consequence: an "outbreak" or "breaking out" (H6555) against them, using a verb from a different root than the "breaking through" of the priests/people, though both roots relate to violent rupture.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yeherasu ("they break through") with βιαζέσθωσαν ("let them not force/press"), a more general verb of forceful action rather than the specific "breaking through" of the Hebrew. For the final clause, the LXX has μή ποτε ἀπολέσῃ ("lest he destroy"), where the Hebrew verb yifrotz ("break out") describes a violent eruption rather than destruction as such. The Vulgate adds an explicit noun not present in the Hebrew, "ne transeant terminos" ("let them not cross the boundaries"), specifying a spatial limit implied but not stated in the Hebrew text, and uses "interficiat" ("kill") for yifrotz, again shifting from the image of "breaking out" to one of killing.