Exodus 32:7

Summary

Yehovah speaks to Moses, issuing the double command to "go, go down" from the mountain, because the people Moses had brought up out of Egypt have acted corruptly. The verse frames divine speech, urgent imperative, and a causal accusation against "your people" in a tight four-clause structure.

Key words

• y'daBer ("he spoke", H1696G) — piel narrative form; the intensive stem marks formal, direct divine speech rather than casual talk.
• lekh-red ("go" / "go down", H1980G + H3381) — two qal imperatives stacked without a connecting vav, producing an urgent, almost breathless command sequence.
• shiChet ("it has behaved corruptly", H7843) — piel perfect; the intensive stem intensifies the verbal action, and the perfect aspect marks the corruption as an already-completed state at the moment of speech.
• 'ammeKha ("your people", H5971A + H9021) — construct noun with 2ms suffix; grammatically ties the people's identity to Moses rather than to Yehovah at this point in the sentence.
• he'eLeita ("you brought up", H5927H) — hiphil perfect, causative; marks Moses as the causing agent of the exodus event, referenced back to frame the accusation.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav on va-y'daBer, the standard device that moves the story forward: "and then Yehovah spoke." The piel stem of daBer is the normal verb for reported speech and does not by itself add intensity beyond the lexical meaning "speak."

The core command is built from two qal imperatives placed side by side, lekh ("go") and red ("go down"), with no conjunction between them. This asyndetic pairing gives the instruction a compressed, urgent rhythm: one movement into another, without a connecting "and."

The causal clause introduced by ki ("for/that") explains the command: shiChet 'ammeKha, "your people has behaved corruptly." The noun 'am ("people") is in construct with the second-person suffix -Kha ("your"), so grammatically the people are labeled as belonging to Moses at this point in the speech, rather than to Yehovah. This is followed by a relative clause, 'asher he'eLeita mе'Eretz Mitzrayim, "which you brought up from the land of Egypt," using the hiphil (causative) perfect of 'alah, marking Moses as the one who caused the people's ascent out of Egypt.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) shows a doublet at the verb of speech: it gives both ἐκάλησεν ("he called") and ἐλάλησεν ("he spoke"), where the Hebrew has only one verb, y'daBer ("he spoke," H1696G). The LXX also adds λέγων ("saying") and the phrase τὸ τάχος ἐντεῦθεν ("quickly, from here"), elements not present in the Hebrew imperatives lekh-red. The Vulgate (Vade, descende) and the Hebrew imperatives align closely as a two-word command. Where the Hebrew ki functions as a causal particle ("for"), the LXX renders it with γάρ, matching the causal sense, while the construct phrase 'ammeKha ("your people") is rendered in both LXX (ὁ λαός σου) and Vulgate (populus tuus) with equivalent possessive constructions.