Exodus 4:25

Summary

The verse narrates four sequential actions by Zipporah: she takes a flint, cuts her son's foreskin, brings it into contact with "his" feet, and speaks a phrase to her husband. The Hebrew grammar keeps her as the sole grammatical subject throughout, and the referent of "his feet" is left ambiguous by the pronoun alone.

Key words

• tikkach ("she took", H3947G) — qal wayyiqtol form; the narrative vav marks this as the first link in a chain of sequential past actions, all performed by Zipporah.
• va-tikrot ("and she cut off", H3772G) — same wayyiqtol pattern, keeping Zipporah as subject; the object is marked by 'et (H0853), the untranslated direct-object marker.
• 'orlat ("foreskin of", H6190H) — feminine singular noun in construct state, bound to ben ("son", H1121A) plus the suffix -ah ("her"), giving "the foreskin of her son."
• tagga' ("she made [it] touch", H5060) — hiphil (causative) stem: Zipporah causes something (unspecified by the verb itself) to touch raglav ("his feet", H7272 + H9023), where the possessive suffix "his" is grammatically ambiguous between the son and the addressee.
• chatan-damim ("bridegroom of bloods", H2860 + H1818) — construct chain with damim in the plural form; the plural noun "bloods" stands in construct after "bridegroom," producing a compact phrase without an explicit verb "to be" in the Hebrew (supplied by the following pronoun 'attah, "you", H0859A).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of four wayyiqtol verbs (tikkach, tikrot, tagga', to'mer), each introduced by the narrative va- (H9001), which strings the actions into a single continuous sequence with Zipporah as the unchanging grammatical subject. The verb tagga' is hiphil, meaning she "causes to touch," but the text does not specify grammatically what object is brought into contact with the feet — the foreskin or the blood from the cutting are both plausible referents left for the reader to infer from context, not from the grammar itself. Similarly, the pronominal suffix on raglav ("his feet") does not indicate by itself whether "his" points to the son or to the husband; the Hebrew grammar alone does not resolve this. The closing phrase, chatan-damim 'attah li ("bridegroom of bloods [are] you to me"), uses a construct noun chain with no copula, and the plural damim ("bloods") is a plural noun rather than a description of the addressee's identity through an added particle.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew closing statement is addressed directly to "you" ('attah, second-person masculine singular) and uses the construct phrase "bridegroom of bloods." The LXX instead renders this final clause in the third person, referring to "the blood of the circumcision of my child" (τὸ αἷμα τῆς περιτομῆς τοῦ παιδίου μου) with the verb ἔστη ("stood/stopped"), producing a statement about the blood itself rather than a direct address about the husband's identity. The Vulgate, Sponsus sanguinum tu mihi es, follows the Hebrew construct chain and second-person address closely. The BSB translation supplies "Moses' feet," specifying the referent of "his feet" that the Hebrew pronoun leaves unstated.