Exodus 2:10

Summary

This verse narrates the child's growth, his transfer from his nursing mother to Pharaoh's daughter, his adoption as her son, and the naming of Mosheh ("Moses"), together with the etymological explanation she gives for the name — that she "drew him from the water."

Key words

• yig.Dal ("he grew up", H1431) — qal narrative verb, third-person masculine, opening the verse with a temporal marker of the child's development before the transfer.
• te.vi.'E ("she brought him", H0935P) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb; the causative stem indicates the subject actively caused the child to be brought, rather than the child moving on his own.
• mo.Sheh ("Moses", H4872) — proper name, morphologically resembling an active participle form, functioning here as the name-word around which the following etymology is built.
• me.shi.Ti ("I drew", H4871) — qal perfect, first-person, completed action; supplies the root that sounds like the name Mosheh, forming the basis of the naming explanation.
• ki ("that", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the quoted reason for the name, here functioning causally ("because").

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of five narrative clauses, each opened by the vav-narrative construction (va-), which in Biblical Hebrew signals sequential action: the child grew, she brought him, he became a son, she called his name, she said. This chain creates a compressed timeline in which growth, adoption, and naming are presented as one continuous narrative movement rather than separate scenes.

The final two clauses form a naming etymology: tikra shemo Mosheh ("she called his name Moses") is immediately followed by va-tomer ("and she said") introducing the causal clause with ki ("that/because"), followed by min-hamayim meshitihu ("from the water I drew him"). The verb meshiti ("I drew", H4871) shares a root sound with Mosheh (H4872), so the explanation functions as a sound-based justification for the name within the Hebrew text itself — a connection visible only in the Hebrew consonants and not preserved as a wordplay in translation, though the causal explanation itself is retained.

The suffixed pronouns (-hu, "him"; -lah, "to her") throughout the verse keep the identity of "the child" and "her" (Pharaoh's daughter, named in the preceding construct phrase bat-Par'oh, "daughter of Pharaoh", H1323/H6547) continuously tracked without needing repeated nouns, typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative style.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causal clause similarly, using λέγουσα ("saying") to introduce the quotation, and ἀνειλόμην ("I took up/drew out") for meshitihu, preserving the causal sense of ki but not the sound-play with Mosheh/Moyses. The Vulgate's vocavitque nomen ejus Moyses, dicens: Quia de aqua tuli eum similarly conveys the reason ("because I drew him from the water") without reproducing the Hebrew name-verb assonance, since tuli ("I drew/took") does not phonetically echo Moyses.