Exodus 2:3

Summary

The verse describes how the child's mother, having exhausted the possibility of concealment, constructs a small vessel from papyrus, seals it against water, places the child inside, and sets it among the reeds at the edge of the river.

Key words

• yakhelah ("she was able", H3201) — qal perfect, negated by lo' ("not", H3808); expresses a completed state now ended: her ability to conceal had run out.
• hatzeh phino ("to hide him", H6845) — hiphil infinitive with pronominal suffix; the causative stem plus infinitive form indicates the action of hiding as a process, object marked directly by the suffix "him" rather than a separate word.
• tevat gome ("basket of papyrus", H8392 + H1573) — construct chain: tevat ("basket of") governs gome ("papyrus"), naming the material of the vessel.
• tachmerah ("she sealed it", H2560B) — qal narrative form with 3rd-person feminine object suffix ("it"/"her"), continuing the narrative chain begun with va- ("and then").
• ye'or ("the River", H2975G) — proper name for the river, used with the definite article, referring to a specific watercourse.

What the text says

The verse opens with a negated perfect verb, ve-lo' yakhelah ("and she was not able"), paired with the adverb 'od ("still", H5750) and the hiphil infinitive hatzeh phino ("to hide him"). This construction states that her capacity for concealment has reached its end point — the perfect aspect marks it as a completed situation rather than an ongoing struggle.

From there, the sentence shifts into a chain of narrative vav forms (va-tikach, "and she took"; va-tachmerah, "and she sealed it"; va-tasem, "and she put" — occurring twice). This vav-consecutive pattern is the standard way Biblical Hebrew narrates sequential events: each verb picks up from the previous one, producing a tight temporal sequence — she took the basket, sealed it, placed the child in it, placed it among the reeds. The construct phrase tevat gome ("basket of papyrus") specifies material through direct noun-noun linkage rather than an adjective. The final phrase, 'al-sefat ha-ye'or ("at the bank of the River"), uses another construct noun (sefat, "bank of") to locate the action precisely at the water's edge.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the basket material as fiscellam scirpeam ("little basket of rushes"), and the Spanish RV1909 similarly uses "juncos" ("rushes"), where the Hebrew gome (H1573) specifically denotes papyrus. The Greek LXX text supplied here is fragmentary and introduces an explicit reference to "her mother" (η μήτηρ αὐτοῦ) as subject, a noun not present in the Hebrew clause, where the subject is carried only by the verb's feminine form.