Exodus 32:9

Summary

YHWH speaks directly to Moses, declaring that he has observed "this people" and characterizing them with the idiom "stiff of neck." The verse functions as a divine assessment introducing the narrative that follows.

Key words

• ra'iti ("I have seen", H7200) — qal perfect, 1st person: a completed act of perception, "I have seen/observed," expressing a settled judgment based on what has been witnessed.
• ha'am hazzeh ("this people", H5971A + H2088) — noun with definite article followed by demonstrative "this," pointing at the people as a specific, identified group rather than people in general.
• hinneh ("there!", H2009) — interjection that draws attention, often introducing a vivid or emphatic observation; here it sets up the description that follows.
• qesheh-'oref ("stiff of neck", H7186 + H6203) — adjective in construct form governing "neck": literally "hard/stiff of neck," an idiomatic construct phrase functioning as a compound description.
• hu' ("it/he", H1931) — independent personal pronoun placed at the end, reinforcing the predicate nominal clause "a people stiff of neck [is] it."

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula vayyomer YHWH 'el-Mosheh ("and YHWH said to Moses"), using the vav-consecutive form of 'amar ("to say", H0559) that marks a new speech event in the flow of the story. What follows is direct divine speech introduced without further markers.

The speech itself has two parts joined by ve- ("and"). The first, ra'iti 'et-ha'am hazzeh ("I have seen this people"), uses the qal perfect ra'iti, indicating an action already completed — the seeing is presented as accomplished fact, not an ongoing process. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) marks "the people" as the grammatical object of the verb, and the demonstrative hazzeh ("this") specifies exactly which people is meant.

The second part, introduced by hinneh ("there!," H2009), shifts to a nominal clause: 'am-qesheh-'oref hu' ("a people stiff of neck it [is]"). Here there is no verb "to be" in Hebrew; the predicate is formed by juxtaposing the noun phrase 'am qesheh-'oref with the pronoun hu', which in Hebrew syntax often adds emphasis to the identification, roughly "it is [precisely] a stiff-necked people." The construct phrase qesheh-'oref combines the adjective "stiff/hard" with "neck" to form a fixed idiomatic description of stubbornness.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the nominal clause with an explicit verb, sit ("is/be"), supplying what Hebrew leaves implicit through the pronoun hu'. The Septuagint text provided here (Οὗτοι οἱ θεοί σου...) corresponds instead to the wording of Exodus 32:8 ("These are your gods, Israel..."), not to the Hebrew of 32:9, so no direct comparison of the Greek rendering of this specific verse can be made from the data given.