Exodus 4:1

Summary

Moses responds to Yehovah by voicing a concern: the people will not believe him nor listen to his voice, because they will claim that Yehovah has not appeared to him. The verse presents Moses' anticipated objection using an interjection followed by two parallel negative statements and a quoted objection.

Key words

• va-Ya'an ("he answered", H6030B) — qal narrative form; opens the verse marking Moses' verbal response as the next event in sequence.
• Hen ("here!", H2005) — interjection functioning to draw attention to the statement that follows; often translated "behold" or left as an emphatic marker.
• ya'aminu ("they will believe", H0539) — hiphil imperfect; the hiphil stem here carries a causative-medial sense ("to consider firm/trustworthy"), and the imperfect aspect marks this as an anticipated, not-yet-realized action.
• nir'ah ("he appeared", H7200G) — niphal perfect; the niphal stem marks a passive/reflexive nuance ("to become seen/to show oneself"), and the perfect aspect frames this as a completed past event within the people's imagined speech.
• YHWH ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name, subject of the verb nir'ah, placed at the very end of the verse.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with two narrative verbs in sequence — va-Ya'an ("he answered") and va-Yomer ("he said") — a common construction in Biblical Hebrew narrative that marks consecutive action. What follows is introduced by the interjection Hen ("here!"/"behold"), which draws attention to the content of Moses' objection rather than framing it grammatically as a hypothetical condition.

The objection itself consists of two parallel negative imperfect clauses: lo'-ya'aminu li ("they will not believe me") and ve-lo' yishme'u be-qoli ("and they will not listen to my voice"). Both verbs are imperfect, indicating actions viewed as not-yet-completed or anticipated. The particle ki ("for"/"that") then introduces the reported speech of the people, which itself contains a perfect-tense verb, nir'ah ("he appeared"), in the niphal stem — describing a completed event (Yehovah's appearing) that the people will deny took place, ending the verse by naming YHWH directly.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew opens the objection with the interjection Hen ("behold"), producing an assertive statement: "behold, they will not believe me." The LXX instead uses a conditional construction, Ean me ("if... not"), turning the statement into a hypothetical question, and closes with an addition not present in the Hebrew, ti ero pros autous ("what shall I say to them?"). The Vulgate, by contrast, follows the assertive form of the Hebrew closely: "Non credent mihi... sed dicent" ("They will not believe me... but they will say"), without introducing a conditional structure. The LXX also renders the first verb as sosin ("they may save/rescue") rather than reflecting the sense of ya'aminu ("they will believe"), a further divergence from the Hebrew verb choice.