Exodus 2:15

Summary

Pharaoh learns of Moses' killing of the Egyptian and seeks to kill him. Moses flees from Egypt to the land of Midian, where the narrative uses the same verb twice: first that he "dwelt" there, then that he "sat" by a well.

Key words

• yishma' ("he heard", H8085) — qal narrative form, opening the sequence of events with "and then he heard."
• yevaqesh ("he sought", H1245) — piel (intensive) narrative form; the piel stem here conveys deliberate, sustained effort to kill, not a single momentary act.
• yivrach ("he fled", H1272) — qal narrative, marking Moses' reaction as flight, distinct from the calmer verb used afterward for settling.
• penei ("before/face of", H6440) — construct plural noun, literally "the faces of," used idiomatically with min ("from") to mean "away from Pharaoh's presence."
• yeshev ("he dwelt" / "he sat", H3427) — the identical qal narrative verb appears twice in this verse: once for settling in the land of Midian, once for sitting at the well.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of five narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — yishma', yevaqesh, yivrach, yeshev, yeshev — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which in Biblical Hebrew strings events into sequential "and then" clauses. This creates a rapid succession: hearing leads to seeking, seeking leads to fleeing, fleeing leads to dwelling, dwelling leads to sitting. The object markers 'et (H0853) before "the matter" and before "Moses" are grammatical markers with no independent meaning, simply indicating the direct objects of yishma' and yevaqesh.

A notable feature is the double use of yeshev (H3427): the same root is applied first to Moses settling in "the land of Midian" ('eretz Midyan, using the construct noun 'eretz, H0776) and then to his sitting "at the well" ('al ha-be'er). The Hebrew does not differentiate these two actions with different verbs; the repetition ties Moses' general settlement in Midian to the specific scene at the well where the following narrative (meeting Reuel's daughters) will unfold.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the two occurrences of yeshev with two different Latin verbs — moratus est ("he stayed") for dwelling in Midian, and sedit ("he sat") for the well — distinguishing what the Hebrew expresses with one repeated verb. The LXX similarly varies its rendering: ᾤκησεν ("he settled") for the land of Midian, then adds a participial phrase ἐλθὼν δὲ εἰς γῆν Μαδιάμ ("having come into the land of Midian") before ἐκάθισεν ("he sat"), an expansion not present in the Hebrew, which simply repeats the same clause structure without restating the location a second time.