Exodus 3:13

Summary

Moses addresses God (ha-Elohim, H0430G) and lays out a hypothetical scene: he will go to the bnei Yisra'el ("people of Israel", H1121G), tell them that the God of their ancestors has sent him, and anticipates they will ask for the name of this God — leaving Moses to ask what he should answer.

Key words

• hinneh ("here!", H2009) — an interjection that introduces the scene Moses is describing, often functioning to draw attention to an immediate or vivid situation rather than a distant future one.
• va ("[am] about to go", H0935G) — a qal participle ("the one doing"), which expresses an action in progress or imminent, not a simple future; combined with hinneh and anokhi ("I", H0595) it frames Moses' arrival as something presented as already underway.
• amarti ("I will say", H0559) — a sequential perfect ("continues the sequence"), grammatically linked to the participle va, so the two verbs form one continuous projected scene: "I am going... and I will say."
• shelachani ("he has sent me", H7971G) — qal perfect ("completed action"), the tense used inside the reported speech Moses plans to give, marking the sending as an accomplished fact at the moment of speaking to the Israelites.
• mah-shemo ("what [is] his name", H4100 + H8034) — shem ("name") appears in construct form ("X of...") with the suffix -o ("his"), attached to the interrogative mah ("what?"), forming the direct question embedded in Moses' anticipated dialogue.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of verbs connected by the narrative vav (H9001): va-yomer ("and he said") opens the frame, and everything that follows is Moses' speech to ha-Elohim. Inside that speech, Moses uses hinneh anokhi va — literally "here, I [am] going" — a construction combining the interjection hinneh with a participle, which presents his going to the Israelites as a vivid, near-present scene rather than a remote hypothetical. This is followed by two sequential perfects, amarti ("I will say") and later ve-ameru ("they will say", H0559), both grammatically continuing the action begun by the participle va, so the whole passage reads as a single projected sequence of events: going, speaking, being asked, and needing an answer.

Within the quoted speech attributed to the Israelites, the construct phrase mah-shemo ("what [is] his name") uses the noun shem ("name", H8034) bound to the pronominal suffix -o ("his"), attached to the ancestral God introduced earlier as Elohei avoteichem ("the God of your ancestors", H0430G construct + H0001G construct). The verse closes with Moses repeating the interrogative mah ("what?", H4100) in his own voice — mah omar ("what will I say") — using an imperfect verb form (H0559) that marks ongoing or future action, distinguishing his own uncertain future response from the completed sending (shelachani, perfect) and the anticipated question (ameru, sequential perfect) attributed to the people.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the qal participle va ("[am] about to go") with a future indicative, ἐξελεύσομαι ("I will go out"), where the Hebrew participle plus hinneh suggests an action already framed as underway. The LXX also renders Elohei avoteichem ("God of your ancestors", second person plural suffix) as "the God of our fathers" (πατέρων ἡμῶν, first person plural), differing from the Hebrew's second-person suffix -khem ("your", H9026). The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's second-person form ("Deus patrum vestrorum").