Exodus 34:16

Summary

The verse warns against taking daughters of the foreign inhabitants of the land as wives for one's sons, describing a chain of consequences: those daughters will "prostitute themselves" after their gods, and will in turn cause the sons to do the same. The Hebrew presents this as a sequence of connected actions using consecutive perfect verbs.

Key words

• la.kach.Ta ("you will take", H3947) — qal sequential perfect, 2nd masculine singular; continues a chain of instructions/warnings begun earlier in the passage (v. 15 concerns covenants with the land's inhabitants).
• za.Nu ("they will prostitute themselves", H2181) — qal sequential perfect, 3rd plural; describes the daughters' own action, in the simple (non-causative) stem.
• hiz.Nu ("they will make prostitute themselves", H2181) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, 3rd plural; same root as za.Nu but causative, meaning the daughters cause the action in the sons rather than merely doing it themselves.
• 'e.Lo.hei.Hen ("their gods", H0430 + H9029) — masculine plural noun in construct with feminine plural suffix "their" (referring back to the daughters), repeated twice in the verse.
• 'a.cha.Rei ("after", H0310) — construct form functioning prepositionally, marking the object of the "prostituting" action (i.e., going after/following these gods).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three verbs in sequential perfect: la.kach.Ta ("you will take"), za.Nu ("they will prostitute themselves"), and hiz.Nu ("they will cause to prostitute themselves"). This verbal chain creates a cause-and-effect sequence: taking daughters (verb 1) leads to their own action (verb 2, simple qal), which leads to a second action affecting the sons (verb 3, causative hiphil). The same root H2181 appears in both qal and hiphil forms, so the Hebrew text marks a grammatical distinction between "they prostitute themselves" and "they cause [someone else] to prostitute themselves" — a distinction not visible if both are translated by the same English verb.

The phrase 'a.cha.Rei 'e.Lo.hei.Hen ("after their gods") occurs twice, once tied to each occurrence of the H2181 root, reinforcing the parallel structure: the daughters go "after their gods" and cause the sons to go "after their gods" (repeated with the same construct noun and suffix in v. 22-23 as in v. 13-15).

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) inserts an additional clause not present in the Hebrew word list given: it renders a phrase equivalent to "and you shall give your daughters to their sons" (καὶ τῶν θυγατέρων σου δῷς τοῖς υἱοῖς αὐτῶν), which has no corresponding Hebrew words in the data provided. The LXX also splits the causative structure differently, attributing "ἐκπορνεύσωσιν" (they will fornicate) separately to "your daughters" and then to "your sons," whereas the Hebrew uses one qal verb for the daughters (za.Nu) and one hiphil verb for the sons (hiz.Nu), marking the sons' action as caused rather than as an equivalent parallel action. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's two-step causative logic ("fornicatae... fornicari faciant"), preserving the cause/effect distinction between the daughters' action and the sons' resulting action.