Exodus 32:17

Summary

Joshua hears the sound of the people's shouting and tells Moses that what he hears sounds like the noise of battle in the camp. The verse pairs two occurrences of the same Hebrew noun qol ("sound/voice") in construct chains, first with "the people" and then with "battle."

Key words

• yishma' ("he heard", H8085) — qal verb with narrative vav, opening the sequence of events tied to what Joshua perceives.
• qol ("sound of", H6963) — masculine singular construct noun, used twice in the verse (once for "the people," once for "battle"), creating a deliberate echo between what is heard and what it is interpreted as.
• be-re'o ("in its shouting", H7452 + H9023) — construct noun with 3rd person masculine singular suffix, literally "in its noise/shout," referring back to ha-'am ("the people").
• milchamah ("battle", H4421) — feminine singular noun, the term Joshua uses to characterize the sound, though no actual battle is confirmed in the narrative context of this verse alone.
• ba-machaneh ("in the camp", H9003 + H4264) — preposition plus definite article attached to "camp," locating the sound spatially.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two clauses joined by narrative vav-consecutive forms (va-yishma', "and he heard"; va-yomer, "and he said"), which is the standard mechanism for advancing sequential action in Biblical Hebrew narrative. The first clause places qol ("sound of") in construct with ha-'am ("the people"), and that construct phrase is further qualified by be-re'o, a noun built on the same root as "shout/noise" with a pronominal suffix meaning "its" — literally "the sound of the people in its shouting."

Joshua's direct speech to Moses repeats the same construct noun qol, now paired with milchamah ("battle"): "sound of battle." The repetition of qol...qol across the two clauses is a feature visible only in the Hebrew; it sets up a rhetorical parallel between the raw sound Joshua hears and his verbal interpretation of that sound as martial noise, located ba-machaneh ("in the camp") via the prefixed preposition and article.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders be-re'o with the participle κραζόντων ("of [them] crying out"), turning the Hebrew construct-noun phrase into a genitive participial construction — a shift from a nominal to a verbal description of the noise. The Vulgate similarly uses the participle vociferantis ("crying out") for the same phrase. Additionally, the Vulgate uses two different Latin terms — tumultum for the first qol and ululatus for the second — where the Hebrew and the LXX both preserve the same lexical repetition (qol/qol and φωνή/φωνή, respectively), so the parallel structure visible in Hebrew is less evident in the Vulgate's wording.