Exodus 24:13

Summary

The verse describes Moses rising, together with his attendant Joshua, and then Moses going up the mountain of God. The Hebrew text names two distinct actions — rising and going up — both performed with narrative verb forms marking sequential action.

Key words

• va-yyaqom ("he arose", H6965B) — qal narrative form, marking the first event in sequence: Moses' rising.
• Moshe ("Moses", H4872) — proper name, subject of both verbs in the verse.
• mesharet ("servant", H8334) — piel participle, construct form ("servant of"), describing Joshua's function in relation to Moses via the suffix -o ("his", H9033).
• va-yya'al ("he went up", H5927G) — qal narrative form, the second sequential action, repeating the subject Moshe.
• har ha-Elohim ("mountain of God", H2022G + H0430G) — construct chain: har ("mountain of") governs ha-Elohim ("the God"), with Elohim grammatically plural though referring to a singular divine referent here.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs, both attached to the name Moshe ("Moses", H4872): va-yyaqom ("he arose", H6965B) and va-yya'al ("he went up", H5927G). This construction presents the events as a sequence — first rising, then ascending — with Moses named as subject twice, once for each verb, rather than being carried through with a pronoun. Between these two verbs, the text inserts a second subject, Yehoshua ("Joshua", H3091G), joined to Moses by the conjunction vi ("and", H9002), and identified by the construct participle mesharet-o ("servant of him / his servant", H8334 + H9033) — a piel participle in construct form, which grammatically ties Joshua's identity to his function relative to Moses.

The phrase har ha-Elohim ("mountain of God", H2022G + H0430G) is a construct chain: har ("mountain of") is grammatically bound to ha-Elohim ("the God"), the definite article ha (H9009) marking the noun as specified. Elohim itself is morphologically plural (H0430G) though functioning here as a singular referent within the construct phrase.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) renders the two Hebrew narrative verbs as surrexerunt ("they arose," plural) for the first action, grouping Moses and Joshua together as joint subjects of rising, then separates Moses alone with ascendensque Moyses ("and Moses ascending") for the second action. The Hebrew text, by contrast, gives va-yyaqom ("he arose") only for Moses in the singular, with Joshua introduced afterward as an accompanying figure via the conjunction vi ("and"), not as a co-subject of the rising verb. The BSB reflects this by rendering "Moses set out with Joshua," subordinating Joshua's action to Moses' single verb, closer to the Hebrew's singular verb form than the Vulgate's plural.