Exodus 4:24

Summary

The verse narrates that during a journey, at a lodging place, Yehovah (Yehovah, H3068G) encountered someone and sought to kill him. The Hebrew text uses only pronominal suffixes to indicate the object of both the meeting and the killing, without naming the person directly in this verse.

Key words

• vay.Hi ("it was", H1961) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive) opening the episode, marking a new event in sequence ("and then it happened...").
• yifgeshehu ("he met him", H6298) — qal narrative verb with 3ms pronominal suffix hu ("him"); the referent of this suffix is not restated by name in the verse.
• Yehovah (H3068G) — the subject performing both the meeting and the seeking; no epithet or intermediary is named in the Hebrew.
• yevaqesh ("he sought", H1245) — piel narrative form, an intensive stem indicating deliberate, active pursuit of the following action.
• hamito ("to kill him", H4191) — hiphil infinitive (causative: "to cause to die") with 3ms suffix o ("him"); functions as the object of yevaqesh, giving "he sought to kill him."

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of vav-consecutive narrative verbs — vayehi, vayifgeshehu, vayevaqesh — a typical Biblical Hebrew storytelling structure where each verb picks up the action from the previous one. The syntax places the location markers first (ba-derekh, "on the journey," H1870L; ba-malon, "at the lodging place," H4411), then introduces the subject Yehovah only after the verb of meeting, a word order that in Hebrew narrative often signals the arrival of a new active agent into the scene.

Both pronominal objects — the -hu suffix on "he met him" and the -o suffix on "to kill him" — are third person masculine singular, but the Hebrew text does not restate a proper name for either occurrence within this verse; the identity of "him" depends on the surrounding narrative rather than on grammar internal to verse 24 itself. The infinitive hamito functions verbally as the direct object of the piel verb yevaqesh, producing the sense "he sought his killing" or "he sought to kill him," with the causative (hiphil) stem underscoring that the killing is being brought about rather than occurring spontaneously.

Differences between versions

The LXX text given renders the agent not as Yehovah directly meeting "him," but as συνήντησεν αὐτῷ ἄγγελος Τυρίου ("an angel of Tyre/Tyrian met him"), introducing an angelos figure and a qualifier ("Τυρίου") absent from the Hebrew, which names Yehovah (H3068G) as the sole subject of both verbs. The Vulgate's "Dominus" and the Spanish/English translations (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE) instead follow the Hebrew in naming Yehovah directly as the one who meets and seeks to kill, without any angelic intermediary.