Exodus 20:18

Summary

The verse describes the Israelite people witnessing the sensory phenomena at Sinai — thunder, lightning, the horn-sound, and the smoking mountain — and reports their physical reaction: trembling and retreating to stand at a distance. The clause structure shifts from a descriptive participial scene to a sequence of narrative past-tense actions.

Key words

• ro.'Im ("seeing", H7200G) — qal participle, masculine plural, agreeing with kol ha'am as a collective; it presents the people's perception as an ongoing state rather than a single completed act.
• ko.Lot ("thunder claps", H6963I) — plural of qol, distinct from the singular construct Kol ("sound of", H6963H) used later for the horn; the plural form marks a different referent (repeated thunder) from the singular "sound" of the shofar.
• 'a.Shen ("smoking", H6226) — adjective, masculine singular, describing ha-har ("the mountain") without its own 'et marker preceding it as a separate object, functioning as a predicate to the mountain rather than a listed item like the others.
• i.Yar' ("it saw", H7200G) — qal narrative (vayyiqtol), third person masculine singular, referring back to ha'am ("the people") treated grammatically as a singular collective, contrasting with the plural participle ro.'Im used earlier for the same noun.
• i.ya.Nu.'u ("they trembled", H5128) — qal narrative, third person masculine plural, marking the shift to plural verbal agreement with the people as a group of individuals rather than a singular collective.

What the text says

The verse opens with a participial construction — ve.khol ha.'Am ro.'Im ("and all the people [were] seeing") — which in Hebrew narrative typically signals a scene-setting, ongoing action rather than a single event. This participle governs four objects marked by 'et: the ko.Lot ("thunder claps", plural), the la.pi.Dim ("lightning"), the Kol ha.sho.Far ("sound of the ram's horn", singular construct), and ha.Har 'a.Shen ("the mountain smoking"), the last of which lacks the syntactic parallelism of the others since 'a.Shen is an adjective modifying ha.Har, not a separate noun object.

After this descriptive clause, the text shifts into three narrative (vayyiqtol) verbs: va.yYar' ("and it/he saw"), va.yya.Nu.'u ("and they trembled"), va.yya.'am.Du ("and they stood"). Notably, va.yYar' is singular, agreeing with ha.'Am as a grammatically singular collective noun, while the following two verbs are plural, agreeing with the same people now conceived as multiple individuals. The final phrase, me.Ra.Chok ("from a distance", H7350), specifies the spatial result of their trembling: physical withdrawal.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the plural ha.qqo.Lot ("thunder claps") with the singular Greek φωνήν ("voice"), while the Vulgate uses the plural voces ("voices"), both differing from the more interpretive English "thunder" (BSB) or "relámpagos"/"truenos" split (SBLIBRE). The LXX and Vulgate both add explicit fear vocabulary — φοβηθέντες ("having been afraid") and perterriti ac pavore concussi ("terrified and shaken with fear") — describing the people's emotional state before the trembling, an element not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew, which moves directly from va.yYar' ("it saw") to va.yya.Nu.'u ("they trembled") without an intervening term for fear.