Exodus 34:14

Summary

The verse prohibits bowing down to any other god, giving as reason the nature of Yehovah himself: his "name" is qanna' ("jealous", H7067G/H7067H), and he is described as a jealous god. The sentence structure ties the prohibition directly to a stated attribute of the deity's identity.

Key words

• tishtachaveh ("you must bow down", H7812) — hithpael imperfect, 2nd person masculine singular. The hithpael stem carries a reflexive/self-directed nuance (bowing oneself down); the imperfect aspect marks this as an ongoing or future prohibition rather than a single past event.
• 'El 'acher ("another god", H0410K + H312) — noun with adjective, masculine singular, forming the object of the prohibited action, introduced by the preposition le ("to", H9005).
• qanna' ("jealous", H7067G) — adjective, masculine singular, applied first to shem ("name", H8034) construct with the suffix -o ("his", H9023), i.e., "his name [is] jealous."
• 'El qanna' ("a jealous God", H0410G + H7067H) — the same adjective repeated, now applied directly to 'El ("God") rather than to "his name," forming a second, parallel clause.
• hu' ("he", H1931) — independent personal pronoun placed at the end, adding emphasis to the identification: "jealous... he [is]."

What the text says

The verse is built from two clauses each introduced by ki (H3588A), a particle that can function as "for" or conditionally as "if/that." The first clause states the prohibition: lo' tishtachaveh le-'El 'acher ("you shall not bow down to another god"), using the hithpael imperfect of shachah to express reflexive, repeated, or future-oriented action. The second ki-clause supplies the grounds for the prohibition, built on two parallel statements joined without a conjunction: Yehovah qanna' shemo ("Yehovah, jealous [is] his name") and 'El qanna' hu' ("a jealous God he [is]"). The adjective qanna' appears twice, once attached grammatically to "his name" and once directly to "God," with the pronoun hu' closing the sentence for emphasis.

The Hebrew syntax does not use a copula ("is") — the equational structure ("jealous, his name" / "jealous, he") is achieved through simple juxtaposition, which is a normal feature of Hebrew nominal clauses and cannot be rendered without supplying "is" in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders shemo ("his name") not as a separate description of the "name" as jealous, but restructures the clause as ho theos zēlōton onoma ("God, a jealous name"), collapsing the construct relationship differently than the Hebrew's "his name [is] jealous." The Vulgate follows the Hebrew more closely with nomen ejus ("his name") as a distinct clause element, and adds æmulator ("emulator/rival") as a gloss for the second occurrence of qanna', a term not present in the Hebrew lexical range given here. The SBLIBRE Spanish rendering interprets the final clause as "exige lealtad absoluta" ("demands absolute loyalty"), an interpretive expansion beyond the literal "a jealous God he [is]" found in the Hebrew.