Exodus 23:14

Summary

Exodus 23:14 commands that a pilgrimage-festival be celebrated three times within the year, directed "to me" (God speaking in first person). The verse sets the numeric frame — three annual occasions — for the festival calendar that follows in the subsequent verses.

Key words

• sha.Losh ("three", H7969) — cardinal number, common gender, singular; specifies the count of festival occasions.
• re.ga.Lim ("feet", H7272) — masculine plural noun; literally "feet," but used idiomatically to mean "occasions" or "times," likely referencing the act of going up (on foot) to a festival site.
• ta.Chog ("you will celebrate a festival", H2287) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular; denotes an ongoing or repeated future obligation, from the same root as chag ("festival, pilgrimage feast").
• li ("to me", H9030 with H9005) — pronominal suffix attached to a preposition, marking the addressee/beneficiary of the celebration as the speaker (God).
• ba.Sha.nah ("in the year", H8141 with H9003) — feminine singular noun with prefixed preposition and article, indicating the time frame within which the three occasions occur.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence places the numeral sha.Losh ("three") at the very front, before the noun it modifies, re.ga.Lim ("feet/times"). This fronting emphasizes the count as the key piece of information: the festival obligation is defined first by its frequency. The noun re.ga.Lim is grammatically the plural of "foot" (H7272), but functions here as a unit of occasion or instance — the physical act of going by foot to a festival site stands in for the abstract idea of "times." This is a case where the literal body-part noun carries an idiomatic temporal meaning that a translation using "times" or "occasions" cannot visually connect back to "feet."

The verb ta.Chog is in the qal imperfect, second person masculine singular, addressing an individual (or collective "you") with an instruction that projects into future, repeated action — consistent with a standing calendrical requirement rather than a single event. It shares its root with chag, the noun for "festival" itself, so the sentence essentially says "you will festival-celebrate," embedding the object of the action into the verb root. The suffixed preposition li ("to me") marks the celebration as directed toward the speaker, and the final phrase ba.sha.nah ("in the year") closes the sentence by specifying the temporal container — a single year — within which the three occasions must fall.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders re.ga.Lim ("feet/times") as καιρούς ("times, seasons"), making the idiomatic meaning explicit rather than preserving the literal "feet" imagery. The Vulgate's vicibus ("occasions, turns") similarly abstracts the term, and adds per singulos annos ("through each single year"), a phrase not present as a separate lexical unit in the Hebrew, which simply says bashanah ("in the year").