Exodus 19:25

Summary

The verse reports two sequential actions: Moses descended to the people, and then he spoke to them. The Hebrew text is brief, stating only that Moses spoke, without specifying content.

Key words

• va-yered ("and he went down", H3381) — qal verb with narrative vav, marking a discrete sequential event: "and then he went down."
• Mosheh ("Moses", H4872) — proper noun, subject of both verbs in the verse.
• ha-'am ("the people", H5971A) — definite noun, the destination and audience of Moses' actions.
• va-yomer ("and he said/spoke", H0559) — qal verb with narrative vav, the second event in the chain: "and then he said."
• 'alehem ("to them", H0413 + H9038) — preposition with third-person masculine plural suffix, indicating the people as recipients of the speech, matching ha-'am from earlier in the verse.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two clauses joined by the narrative vav construction, a typical pattern in Biblical Hebrew narrative that presents events as a temporal sequence: first va-yered ("and he went down"), then va-yomer ("and he said"). Both verbs share the same subject, Mosheh, though the subject is stated explicitly only after the first verb, following normal Hebrew word order (verb-subject-object).

The second clause, va-yomer 'alehem ("and he said to them"), does not specify the content of what Moses said. The verb 'amar (H0559) is used here without a direct object clause introducing reported speech, so the Hebrew leaves the content of the speech unstated within this verse. The pronominal suffix in 'alehem ("to them") refers back to ha-'am ("the people") from the first clause, maintaining clear referential continuity across the two actions.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew va-yomer 'alehem ("and he said to them") states only that Moses spoke, without indicating what was said. The LXX renders this with eipen autois ("he said to them"), matching the Hebrew in leaving the content unspecified. The Vulgate, however, reads omnia narravit eis ("and he told them everything"), which adds the word "everything" (omnia) not present in the Hebrew or the LXX, making an explicit claim about the completeness of what Moses communicated that the other two textual traditions do not state.