Exodus 32:24

Summary

Exodus 32:24 is Aaron's account to Moses of how the golden calf was made: he ordered the people to strip off their gold, they gave it to him, he threw it into the fire, and "this calf" emerged. The verse is a first-person narrative chain reporting speech, an imperative command, and the object's sudden appearance from the fire.

Key words

• hitparaku ("tear it off from yourselves", H6561) — hithpael imperative, plural. The hithpael stem marks the action as something the people do to/for themselves, i.e. stripping gold off their own bodies, rather than Aaron collecting it directly.
• va'ashlikhehu ("I threw it", H7993) — hiphil wayyiqtol with 3ms suffix "it" (H9033). The hiphil is causative: Aaron is the explicit agent who causes the gold to enter the fire.
• wayyetze ("it came out", H3318) — qal wayyiqtol, 3ms. The subject of this verb is not Aaron but "the calf" itself; the verb describes the calf's emergence, not an act of fashioning or making by a craftsman.
• ha'egel hazeh ("this calf", H5695 + H2088) — noun with definite article plus demonstrative particle, pointing to the calf as a specific, present object ("this one, right here").
• lemi zahav ("to whom [belongs] gold?", H4310 + H2091) — interrogative pronoun plus noun, forming the quoted command's introductory question within Aaron's reported speech.

What the text says

The verse is built entirely on narrative wayyiqtol verb forms (marked by the narrative vav, H9001) that chain the sequence of events: "I said," "they gave," "I threw," "it came out." This chain reports Aaron's speech to Moses as a rapid sequence of completed actions. Inside the quoted speech, the imperative hitparaku (H6561) is in the hithpael stem, which frames the stripping of gold as something done by the people to themselves upon Aaron's instruction, rather than something Aaron takes from them by force.

The final clause uses wayyetze (H3318), a qal form whose grammatical subject is ha'egel ("the calf," H5695), not Aaron. The Hebrew grammar therefore presents the calf as the entity that "came out" of the fire, without an explicit verb of shaping or crafting attached to Aaron as agent in this verse.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew records hitparaku as a direct imperative ("tear it off"). The LXX instead renders this as a conditional clause, Εἴ τινι ὑπάρχει χρυσία ("if anyone has gold"), reformulating the command as a hypothetical statement. The Vulgate renders it as a question, Quis vestrum habet aurum? ("Who among you has gold?"), which likewise turns the Hebrew imperative into an interrogative construction rather than a direct command.