Exodus 2:25

Summary

The verse reports two divine actions in sequence: Elohim ("God", H0430) "saw" the bene Yisra'el ("people of Israel", H1121/H3478), and then "knew" — the second verb is left without a stated object in the Hebrew. The clause structure is paratactic, joining both actions with the narrative vav.

Key words

• vayyar ("he saw", H7200) — qal narrative form (vav + prefix conjugation), marking a punctual, sequential action: "and then he saw."
• Elohim ("God", H0430) — masculine plural noun functioning as the subject, repeated as subject of both verbs in the verse.
• et ("", H0853) — direct object marker preceding bene Yisra'el, showing that "the people of Israel" is the grammatical object of "saw," but not of the following verb.
• bene ("[the] people of", H1121) — construct form, meaning it must be followed by a genitive noun ("of Israel") to complete its meaning.
• vayyeda' ("he knew", H3045) — qal narrative form, structurally parallel to vayyar, but here without any object marker or noun following it in the Hebrew text.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as two short narrative clauses sharing the same subject, Elohim. The first clause has a complete object marked explicitly by et before bene Yisra'el: "God saw [the object marker] the people of Israel." The second clause, "vayyeda' Elohim," repeats the subject but supplies no object at all — no et, no noun, no pronoun. In the Hebrew grammar as given, the verb yada' ("to know") stands without a stated complement, leaving what God "knew" unspecified in the text itself.

This absence of an object after yada' is the notable feature of the verse: the two verbs are morphologically identical in form (both qal narrative, third person masculine singular) and share the same subject, but only the first carries an explicit grammatical object.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the second verb as ἐγνώσθη αὐτοῖς, a passive construction with a dative pronoun, which can be read as "he was known to them" rather than an active "he knew [something]." The Vulgate instead supplies an explicit object not present in the Hebrew: cognovit eos, "he knew them," using the pronoun "them" to complete the verb. The Hebrew text itself, as given, contains no object for vayyeda', so both the LXX's passive-with-dative rendering and the Vulgate's active-with-object rendering represent interpretive additions relative to the unmarked Hebrew construction.