Exodus 4:19

Summary

Yehovah speaks to Moses while he is in Midian, giving him a double command: to go and to return to Egypt. The reason given is that "all the men" who were seeking his life have died.

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — qal narrative form; the vav-consecutive links this speech to the preceding narrative sequence, marking it as the next event in the story line.
• lekh ("go", H1980) and shuv ("return", H7725) — two qal imperatives placed one after another without a connecting vav, a common Hebrew construction where the first imperative reinforces or introduces the second ("go, return" / "go back").
• metu ("they have died", H4191) — qal perfect, indicating a completed action; it grounds the command in a stated fact that precedes it, functioning as the causal clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588).
• mevaqshim ("the ones seeking", H1245) — piel participle, plural masculine; the piel stem intensifies the action of "seeking," and the participle form presents it as an ongoing or characteristic activity of "the men."
• nafshekha ("your life/soul", H5315 + H9021) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, forming the idiom "seek someone's nefesh," here governed by the direct object marker 'et (H0853).

What the text says

The verse opens with the standard narrative formula va-yomer Yehovah 'el-Mosheh ("and Yehovah said to Moses"), locating the speech "in Midian" (be-Midyan, H4080). The message itself consists of two bare imperatives, lekh and shuv, stacked without a conjunction — a pattern in Biblical Hebrew where the second imperative specifies the direction or goal of the first ("go, [namely] return to Egypt"). The causal clause beginning with ki ("for/because", H3588) supplies the justification: metu kol-ha'anashim hamevaqshim 'et-nafshekha, "all the men who were seeking your nefesh have died." The construct chain kol-ha'anashim ("all of the men") is further specified by the relative-like use of the article ha- before the participle mevaqshim, effectively meaning "the men, the ones seeking." The phrase biqqesh 'et-nafesh ("to seek the nefesh of someone") is an idiom for seeking to kill, built on the participle in the piel stem, which marks the seeking as intensive or purposeful.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew va-yomer is a simple narrative past ("and he said"), matched by the LXX εἶπεν and the Vulgate Dixit ("he said"). The BSB renders this as a pluperfect, "had said," a translational choice not marked morphologically in the Hebrew verb form itself. The Spanish RV1909 renders nafshekha ("your life/soul") as "tu muerte" ("your death"), an interpretive rendering of the idiom, while the LXX (τὴν ψυχήν, "the soul") and Vulgate (animam tuam, "your soul") preserve the literal noun.