Exodus 33:18

Summary

The verse records a request addressed to God: the speaker asks to be shown God's kavod ("glory", H3519). The sentence is short, built on an imperative verb followed by the particle of entreaty and the direct object.

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — qal narrative form, marking the next event in the sequence of speech.
• har'eni ("show me", H7200G) — hiphil (causative) imperative with 1st person suffix: the causative stem turns "to see" into "to cause to see/show", and the imperative form makes this a direct request.
• na ("please", H4994) — an interjection softening the imperative, marking it as a polite entreaty rather than a bare command.
• kevodekha ("your glory", H3519) — noun in construct form with 2nd person suffix, meaning "the glory of you"; construct state links it grammatically to the following possessive.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative marker va attached to yomer ("and he said"), a standard device that advances the story from a previous statement to this new speech act. The core request is compressed into a single verb, har'eni: the hiphil stem of the root behind "to see" (H7200G) makes the verb causative, so instead of "I see" the form produces "cause me to see" — i.e., "show me." The attached 1st-person suffix -ni ("me") is fused directly onto the verb rather than expressed as a separate pronoun, which is typical of Hebrew verbal morphology.

The particle na follows immediately, softening the imperative from a blunt command into a plea — comparable to adding "please" in English, though Hebrew grammars generally treat it as marking entreaty or urgency rather than mere politeness.

The direct object is marked by et (H0853), an untranslatable particle that simply flags what follows as the grammatical object of the verb. That object is kevodekha, a construct-state noun ("glory of") with a 2nd-person masculine singular suffix ("your"), yielding "your glory." The construct chain binds the abstract noun kavod tightly to the addressee, so the request is specifically for the addressee's kavod, not glory in a general sense.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew and the Vulgate agree closely: kevodekha corresponds to Latin gloriam tuam ("your glory"). The Septuagint, however, renders the object differently: instead of a term for "glory," it gives σεαυτόν ("yourself"), producing "show me yourself" rather than "show me your glory." The LXX also uses the present tense λέγει ("he says") for the introductory verb, where the Hebrew va-yomer is a narrative past ("and he said").