Exodus 6:11

Summary

This verse is a divine command to Moses, instructing him to go and speak to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, so that he releases the people of Israel from his land. The sentence combines two imperatives followed by a purpose clause expressed through a verb form with a prefixed conjunction.

Key words

• bo' ("go", H0935G) — qal imperative, a direct command in the simple stem, setting the action of movement.
• daBer ("speak", H1696G) — piel imperative, the intensive stem marking emphatic or formal speech, distinct from the simple act of speaking.
• Melekh ("king of", H4428G) — masculine singular construct noun, linking "king" to "Egypt" in a possessive/descriptive chain ("king of Egypt").
• shaLach ("he may let go", H7971H) — piel imperfect with prefixed vav, expressing purpose or resulting action ("so that he may send away") rather than a simple past or future statement.
• 'arTzo ("his land", H0776G + H9023) — feminine singular construct noun 'aretz ("land") with the third-person masculine singular suffix -o ("his"), attaching possession directly to Pharaoh.

What the text says

The verse opens with two consecutive imperatives, bo' ("go") and daBer ("speak"), both addressed to Moses in the second-person masculine singular. The first is in the qal (simple) stem, indicating basic movement, while the second is in the piel (intensive) stem, a grammatical pattern in Biblical Hebrew often used for verbs of speech to mark formal or forceful communication rather than casual talk. This pairing structures the command as a sequence: first go, then speak.

The addressee of the speech is introduced with the preposition 'el ("to") followed by par'Oh ("Pharaoh") and the construct phrase Melekh mitzRayim ("king of Egypt"), where Melekh stands in construct relationship to mitzRayim, meaning literally "king of Egypt" as a single title unit.

The clause that follows, introduced by the conjunction vi- ("and/so") attached to shaLach ("he may let go"), uses the piel imperfect form with the vav prefix. This construction in Biblical Hebrew commonly signals purpose or intended consequence — "so that he may send away" — rather than a simple sequential past action. The object marked by 'et (untranslated direct object marker) is bene YisraEl ("sons/people of Israel"), another construct chain. The final phrase me'arTzo ("from his land") uses the construct noun 'aretz with the suffix -o ("his"), grammatically tying the land explicitly to Pharaoh as possessor, not to Israel.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the purpose clause with ἴνα ἐξαποστείλῃ ("in order that he may send out"), matching the Hebrew's purpose nuance from the vav-prefixed imperfect. The Vulgate uses "ut dimittat" ("that he may let go"), similarly preserving the purpose sense. The Hebrew daBer ("speak", piel) is rendered simply as λάλησον (LXX) and "loquere" (Vulgate), both of which do not distinctly mark the intensive stem nuance present in the Hebrew verb form.