Exodus 2:17

Summary

The verse narrates a sequence of five actions: shepherds arrive, drive away (the women), Moses stands up, delivers/rescues them, and waters their flock. The Hebrew chains these events with consecutive narrative verb forms, giving a rapid, staccato progression typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative.

Key words

• ro'im ("shepherds", H7462B) — qal participle, masculine plural; describes ongoing agents of the action, "the ones who do the shepherding."
• yegareshum ("they drove them away", H1644G) — piel narrative verb with 3mp suffix; the piel stem intensifies the action, "expel forcefully," attached to a masculine plural object suffix.
• yosha'an ("he delivered them", H3467) — hiphil narrative verb with 3fp suffix; hiphil marks causation ("he caused deliverance/rescue"), and the suffix is grammatically feminine, distinct from the masculine suffix on yegareshum.
• yashk ("he watered", H8248G) — hiphil narrative verb, "he caused [the flock] to drink."
• tzonam ("their flock", H6629G) — noun in construct form with 3mp suffix, "flock of them."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built entirely from narrative (wayyiqtol) verb forms strung together by the vav-consecutive, each introduced by va (H9001). This produces a sequential chain: "and they came... and they drove away... and he arose... and he delivered... and he watered." The grammar does not use subordinating conjunctions; the sequence itself carries the logic of cause and consequence.

A notable grammatical detail is the shift in the pronominal suffix attached to the verbs of driving away and delivering. Yegareshum ("they drove them away") carries a masculine plural suffix, while yosha'an ("he delivered them") carries a feminine plural suffix. This distinction is grammatically marked in Hebrew morphology but is not visible in translations that render both simply as "them," since English and many other languages do not mark gender on object pronouns in this way. The feminine suffix on yosha'an signals that the recipients of Moses's action are specifically female, a detail embedded in the verb morphology itself rather than stated by a separate noun.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate makes explicit what the Hebrew suffix only implies grammatically: it adds puellis ("the girls"), explicitly naming the referents of the feminine suffix rather than leaving them as a pronoun. The LXX preserves the pronoun form, αὐτάς ("them," feminine), matching the Hebrew's feminine suffix without adding a noun. The Hebrew itself never names the referents in this verse; the feminine gender is conveyed only through the suffix on yosha'an.