Exodus 33:23

Summary

Exodus 33:23 continues God's speech to Moses, describing a sequence of actions: the removal of a covering hand, Moses being permitted to see God's back parts, and the explicit statement that God's face will not be seen. The verse uses a chain of sequential verbs that convey both temporal order and causal consequence.

Key words

• ha.si.ro.Ti ("I will remove", H5493G) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem indicates an action performed by the subject upon something else, here linked by the narrative vav to what follows.
• ka.P ("palm", H3709G) — feminine singular construct noun with pronominal suffix i ("my"), together forming "my palm/hand"; construct form ties it directly to the following suffix rather than an independent noun.
• ra.'I.ta ("you will see", H7200G) — qal sequential perfect, second person masculine; same root appears later in niphal form, creating a grammatical contrast between active seeing and passive/reflexive "being seen."
• 'a.cho.Ra ("back parts", H0268) — masculine plural construct with suffix i, literally "my back parts," plural form suggesting a general area rather than a single point.
• ye.ra.'U ("they will be visible", H7200G) — niphal imperfect, third person masculine plural, from the same root as ra.'I.ta. The niphal stem marks the passive/reflexive sense "to be seen" rather than "to see," and the imperfect aspect marks ongoing or future non-occurrence, reinforced by the preceding negation lo' ("not", H3808).

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of three clauses connected by the narrative vav (H9001), which links sequential perfects to indicate a series of consecutive actions: first ha.si.ro.Ti ("I will remove"), then ra.'I.ta ("you will see"). This construction presents the removal of "my palm" (ka.P + suffix i) as the condition that enables the subsequent seeing of "my back parts" ('a.cho.Ra + suffix i). Both "palm" and "back parts" are grammatically in construct form with the first-person suffix i ("my"), a common way in Hebrew to express possession without a separate possessive word.

The final clause shifts verb stem: instead of continuing with active ra'ah ("to see") in qal, the text uses the niphal form ye.ra.'U ("they will be visible"), matching the plural noun fa.Na ("face", H6440H), which — like 'a.cho.Ra — is grammatically plural in Hebrew even when referring to a single face. The niphal stem shifts the grammatical subject from an agent who sees to the face itself as the entity that is or is not seen, and the negation lo' placed before the verb marks this non-occurrence directly. The word order in this last clause departs from the vav-led chain: instead of opening with a conjunction plus verb, it opens with the noun phrase u.fa.Na.i ("and my face"), placing emphasis on "face" as the topic before stating what does not happen to it.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the sequence with ἀφελῶ ("I will remove") and ὄψῃ ("you will see"), matching the Hebrew's two active perfects, but adds τότε ("then"), an explicit temporal marker not present in the Hebrew text. For the final clause, the LXX uses ὀφθήσοι (a passive optative/future form of "to see"), corresponding to the niphal ye.ra.'U, though Greek here marks the verb as singular where the Hebrew is grammatically plural (fa.Na, "face", plural construct). The Vulgate's videre non poteris ("you will not be able to see") introduces the notion of ability/capacity ("poteris", "you will be able"), which is not present in the Hebrew's lo' yera'u ("they will not be seen"); the Hebrew states the non-occurrence of being seen, while the Vulgate frames it as Moses's inability to see.