Exodus 20:22

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to tell the Israelites that they themselves have witnessed something: that he has spoken to them from the heavens. The verse frames direct speech within direct speech — a divine command about what Moses must relay.

Key words

• va-yYomer ("and he said", H0559) — qal narrative form marking a new sequential event in the story; the vav-consecutive links this to the preceding narrative flow.
• toMar ("you will say", H0559) — same root as yYomer but imperfect, expressing an instruction for future/ongoing action: Moses is commanded to speak, not merely reporting that he spoke.
• re'iTem ("you have seen", H7200) — qal perfect, second person masculine plural, marking a completed action attributed to the addressees (the benei Yisra'el, "sons/people of Israel", H1121). The perfect aspect presents this seeing as an accomplished fact prior to the statement that follows.
• dibbarti ("I have spoken", H1696) — piel perfect, first person singular. The piel stem is the intensive form of the root for "to speak," and the perfect aspect marks completed speech action attributed to the divine "I."
• 'immaKhem ("with you", H5973 + H9036) — preposition with second person masculine plural suffix, indicating the addressees of the completed speech act denoted by dibbarti.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative chain: va-yYomer Yehovah 'el-Mosheh ("and Yehovah said to Moses"), followed by a command using koh ("thus", H3541) plus the imperfect toMar ("you will say") — a common formula introducing reported speech that Moses is to deliver verbatim to benei Yisra'el ("the people of Israel").

The embedded speech begins with the independent pronoun 'atem ("you", H0859), placed before the verb re'iTem ("you have seen"). This word order (pronoun preceding verb) places emphasis on the subject "you" as the ones who witnessed the event, rather than merely stating the action. The clause introduced by ki (H3588, here functioning as "that") specifies what was seen: min-ha-shaMayim dibbarti 'immaKhem — "from the heavens I have spoken with you." The prepositional phrase min-ha-shaMayim ("from the heavens") is fronted before the verb dibbarti, giving spatial emphasis to the source of the speech-act before naming the act itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX inserts an addressee not present in the Hebrew: it renders the command as being spoken to "the house of Jacob" (τῷ οἴκῳ Ἰακώβ) in addition to "the sons of Israel" (τοῖς υἱοῖς Ἰσραήλ), where the Hebrew text has only benei Yisra'el ("the people of Israel"). The Vulgate and other versions follow the Hebrew in naming only "the sons of Israel" (filiis Israël).