Exodus 23:25

Summary

The verse instructs service to Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) as God, promising in return blessing on food and water, and the removal of sickness. The Hebrew text moves through a chain of sequential perfect verbs describing consequences that follow from the act of service.

Key words

• 'avadTem ("you will serve", H5647H) — qal sequential perfect, 2nd person masculine plural; continues a verbal chain begun earlier in the passage, addressed to the group.
• veRakh ("he will bless", H1288) — piel (intensive) sequential perfect, 3rd person masculine singular; the subject is Yehovah, referred to here in the third person even though he is presumably the speaker.
• hasiroTi ("I will remove", H5493G) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, 1st person singular; here the grammatical subject shifts to "I," a direct first-person voice.
• lachmekha ("your bread/food", H3899H) — masculine singular noun in construct with the 2ms suffix -kha, "your."
• machalah ("sickness", H4245B) — feminine singular noun, the object of removal in the final clause.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of three sequential perfect verbs (va'avadTem, uveRakh, vahasiroTi), a common construction in Biblical Hebrew for expressing a sequence of future actions or consequences tied together by the narrative vav ("and", H9001). Each verb carries its own grammatical subject and person: the addressed group ("you will serve," 2mp), then a 3rd-person singular verb ("he will bless"), and finally a 1st-person singular verb ("I will remove"). This produces a shift in grammatical voice within a single sentence — the entity referred to as "he" in the second clause becomes "I" in the third, both referring to the same speaker, Yehovah.

The objects of blessing, lachmekha ("your food", H3899H) and meimeikha ("your water", H4325G), are both marked with the direct object marker 'et (H0853) and bear the 2ms suffix -kha, "your," tying the blessing directly to the addressee's sustenance. The final clause names machalah ("sickness", H4245B) as the object removed, using the preposition mi- ("from", H9006) attached to qirbekha ("your midst", H7130G), a construct noun with suffix indicating location "from within you."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the objects of blessing as "τὸν ἄρτον σου καὶ τὸν οἶνόν σευ καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ σου" ("your bread and your wine and your water"), adding a reference to wine (οἶνόν) that is not present in the Hebrew text, which names only lachmekha ("your food/bread") and meimeikha ("your water"). The Vulgate follows the Hebrew more closely with "panibus tuis et aquis" ("your breads and waters"), without a wine reference.