Exodus 4:20

Summary

Exodus 4:20 narrates Moses taking his wife and sons, mounting them on a donkey, and returning toward Egypt, then taking "the staff of God" in his hand. The verse is built as a chain of four sequential narrative verbs describing successive actions performed by Moses.

Key words

• va-yiqqach ("and he took", H3947G) — qal narrative form, appearing twice in the verse (opening and closing), framing the whole action as beginning and ending with Moses's own taking.
• ishto ("his wife", H0802H) — feminine singular noun in construct with the pronominal suffix -o ("his"), directly bound to Moses as the one who takes her.
• va-yarkivem ("and he made [them] ride", H7392) — hiphil (causative) stem: Moses does not merely put them on the donkey but causes them to ride, expressing his agency over their movement.
• artzah ("[toward the] land of", H0776G) — construct noun with directional -h suffix, marking motion "toward" Egypt rather than simple location.
• matteh ha-Elohim ("the staff of the God/gods", H4294G + H0430G) — construct chain linking "staff" to "God/gods" (a plural-form noun used for the divine name), naming the object Moses carries.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is organized as a sequence of four wayyiqtol (narrative) verbs: va-yiqqach ("he took"), va-yarkivem ("he made them ride"), va-yashov ("he returned"), and again va-yiqqach ("he took"). This chain structure presents the events as a single continuous narrative line, each action following directly from the last, typical of Biblical Hebrew storytelling. The repetition of va-yiqqach at both the start and end of the verse — first taking his family, then taking the staff — creates a symmetrical framing within the verse itself, though the two "takings" concern different objects and are separated by the intervening actions of mounting the donkey and returning.

The hiphil form of va-yarkivem ("he made [them] ride", H7392) specifies that Moses causes the mounting to happen, rather than simply describing the wife and sons as riding on their own. The directional suffix on artzah ("toward the land", H0776G) explicitly marks motion toward Egypt as a goal, a nuance not always visible in translations that render it simply as "to Egypt." The construct phrase matteh ha-Elohim ("staff of the God/gods", H4294G–H0430G) ties the staff grammatically and directly to the divine noun, without further explanatory clause.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the donkey as plural, τὰ ὑποζύγια ("the beasts of burden"), where the Hebrew has the singular definite noun ha-chamor ("the donkey", H2543). For the object Moses carries, the LXX has τὴν ῥάβδον τὴν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ ("the rod which was from/beside God"), a descriptive phrase differing from the Hebrew's simple construct matteh ha-Elohim ("staff of God"). The Vulgate uses the participle "portans" ("carrying") for the final clause instead of a second finite verb "took," differing from the Hebrew's repeated va-yiqqach structure.