Exodus 6:1

Summary

Yehovah answers Moses, declaring that Moses will now see what will be done to Pharaoh. The verse states that "a strong hand" will cause the release and expulsion of the people from Pharaoh's land, using two parallel piel verbs whose grammatical subject is masculine singular.

Key words

• iYomer ("he said", H0559) — qal narrative form with the vav-consecutive prefix, marking the next event in the story sequence.
• tir'eh ("you will see", H7200G) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine singular, addressed directly to Moses.
• yad chazaqah ("a strong hand", H3027H + H2389) — noun + feminine adjective, appearing twice, with no pronominal suffix attached; the text does not specify whose hand this is.
• yeshallechem ("he will let go them", H7971G + H9038) — piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular, with a 3rd person plural object suffix ("them"); the piel stem gives a causative sense ("cause to go/send away").
• yegareshem ("he will drive out them", H1644G + H9038) — piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular, parallel in form to the previous verb, also causative.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the standard narrative construction va-yomer + subject (Yehovah) + addressee ('el-Mosheh), which simply moves the story forward. The core statement to Moses is built on the imperfect tir'eh ("you will see") followed by a relative clause introduced by 'asher ("which"), governing 'e'eseh ("I will do") — so the grammatical subject of "doing" is Yehovah, but the object of the seeing is what happens to Pharaoh.

The second half of the verse, introduced by ki ("for/that"), contains two grammatically parallel clauses: be-yad chazaqah yeshallechem and u-ve-yad chazaqah yegareshem. Both verbs are piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular, with a 3rd person plural pronominal suffix ("them") as object. Because the last singular masculine referent introduced in the sentence is Pharaoh (not Yehovah, who is grammatically outside this subordinate clause), the verbal subject implied by the 3ms verb forms is Pharaoh — "he [Pharaoh] will send them away" / "he will drive them out." The phrase yad chazaqah ("a strong hand") carries no possessive suffix in the Hebrew, so the text itself does not grammatically assign the hand to either Yehovah or Pharaoh. The verse closes with me-'artzo ("from his land"), where the suffix -o ("his") explicitly refers back to Pharaoh.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the phrase as ἐν χειρὶ κραταιᾷ ("with a mighty hand") and the Vulgate as per manum fortem ("through a strong hand"), both without any possessive pronoun, matching the unmarked Hebrew yad chazaqah. The BSB translation adds "My," rendering it "because of My mighty hand," attributing the hand explicitly to Yehovah — a specification not present as a grammatical marker in the Hebrew, LXX, or Vulgate texts given.