Exodus 3:16

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to gather the elders of Israel and deliver a message: the God of their ancestors has appeared to him and declares that he has taken notice of their affliction in Egypt. The verse combines a command sequence with a quoted divine speech introduced by le'mor ("saying", H0559).

Key words

• lekh ("go", H1980G) — qal imperative, opening a chain of commands to Moses.
• 'asafTa ("you will gather", H0622) — qal sequential perfect (waw-consecutive), continuing the imperative force of lekh as a command rather than a simple future.
• nir'ah ("he appeared", H7200G) — niphal perfect of the root meaning "to see"; the niphal (passive/reflexive) stem produces the sense "he was seen / he appeared," describing the subject as the one who became visible rather than the one who saw.
• paqod ("certainly [to observe]", H6485I) — qal infinitive absolute of the same root as the following finite verb, used to intensify it.
• paqadTi ("I have observed", H6485I) — qal perfect, 1st person; paired with the infinitive absolute paqod to form an emphatic construction.

What the text says

The verse opens with a string of verbs governed by waw-consecutive syntax: the imperative lekh ("go") is followed by two sequential perfects, 'asafTa ("you will gather") and 'amarTa ("you will say"), both carrying the same command force as the initial imperative. This is a common Biblical Hebrew pattern in which a perfect verb form with prefixed ve continues the mood of a preceding imperative, producing a chain: "go — [and] gather — [and] say."

The reported speech is framed by le'mor ("saying", H0559), an infinitive construct that introduces direct discourse. Within that speech, the divine name Yehovah (H3068G) is followed by the construct phrase 'elohei 'avoteikhem ("God of your ancestors," H0430G + H0001G), itself further specified by 'elohei 'Avraham Yitzchak ve-Ya'aqov ("God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob"). The verb nir'ah ("he appeared," H7200G) is niphal, marking the subject (Yehovah) as the one who was made visible/appeared to the speaker, syntactically placed after the divine title rather than before it — a common Hebrew word order where the subject noun phrase precedes its verb in reported speech of this kind.

The clause paqod paqadTi 'etkhem uses the infinitive absolute paqod (H6485I) together with the finite perfect paqadTi ("I have observed") from the same root, a construction that intensifies or underscores the finite verb — rendered in the data as "certainly ... observed." The same verbal idea, expressed through the passive participle 'asui ("[thing] done," H6213A), describes what "has been done" to the people, followed by the locative phrase be-Mitzrayim ("in Egypt," H4714G).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew infinitive-absolute construction paqod paqadTi ("certainly I have observed") is rendered in the LXX as epikopē epeskemmai ("with visitation I have visited/inspected"), a Greek cognate-noun-plus-verb construction paralleling the Hebrew intensifying pattern. The Vulgate mirrors this with Visitans visitavi ("visiting I have visited"), also reproducing the doubled-root emphasis. Regarding he'asui lakhem be-Mitzrayim ("the [thing] done to you in Egypt"), the LXX reads hosa symbebēken hymin ("as many things as have happened to you"), and the Vulgate has vidi omnia quae acciderunt vobis ("I have seen all that has happened to you"), both adding an explicit verb of seeing not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew clause, which relies on the participle 'asui alone.