Exodus 2:24

Summary

The verse reports two consecutive actions of God in the narrative sequence of Exodus: he heard the groaning of the Israelites, and he remembered the covenant he had made, associated with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Key words

• va-yish.ma' ("he heard", H8085G) — qal narrative form; the vav-consecutive marks this as the next event in the story line, immediately following the preceding narrative context.
• 'Elohim ("God", H0430G) — masculine plural noun (grammatically plural though referring to a single subject), used twice, once as subject of "heard" and once as subject of "remembered."
• na'akatam ("their groaning", H5009) — feminine singular noun in construct form with the suffix "their," meaning literally "the groaning of them."
• va-yizkor ("he remembered", H2142) — qal narrative form, parallel in structure to va-yishma', forming the second half of the paired action.
• berito ("his covenant", H1285) — feminine singular noun in construct form with the suffix "his," meaning "the covenant of him."

What the text says

The verse is built on two parallel narrative clauses, each following the pattern verb-subject-object: va-yishma' Elohim et-na'akatam ("and God heard their groaning") and va-yizkor Elohim et-berito ("and God remembered his covenant"). The repetition of Elohim as subject in both clauses, rather than an implied pronoun, gives each action its own explicit grammatical weight within the sequence.

The object of the second clause, "his covenant," is then specified by a chain of three prepositional phrases using 'et (H0854, "with"): et-Avraham, et-Yitzchak, ve-et-Ya'akov. This preposition (H0854) is distinct from the direct object marker 'et (H0853) used earlier in the verse for "their groaning" and "his covenant" — the same consonantal spelling serves two different grammatical functions here, one marking direct objects and the other marking accompaniment ("with"). The three names are joined asyndetically except for a single conjunction ve ("and", H9002) before the last name, Jacob, a common Hebrew list pattern.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the three names with the phrase τῆς πρὸς Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἰακώβ ("the [covenant] toward/with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob"), using a single preposition πρὸς for all three, followed by καὶ before each subsequent name, whereas the Hebrew repeats the preposition 'et ("with") before each name individually. The Vulgate similarly renders the phrase as "quod pepigit cum Abraham, Isaac et Jacob" ("which he made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob"), adding the verb "pepigit" ("he made/struck [a covenant]"), which has no corresponding word in the Hebrew text, where the relationship between "covenant" and the three names is expressed only through the repeated preposition 'et.