Exodus 6:7

Summary

Yehovah states three consecutive actions toward Israel: he will take them as his people, he will become their God, and they will come to know that he is Yehovah, their God, who brings them out from under the forced labor of Egypt. The verse links divine self-identification to the act of liberation.

Key words

• laqachti ("I will take", H3947) — qal sequential perfect, continuing a chain of divine actions begun earlier in the passage; expresses a future action grammatically tied to what precedes.
• 'am ("a people", H5971) — masculine singular noun, the object toward which the taking is directed; paired with the preposition li ("for myself") to mark possession.
• elohim ("God", H430) — masculine plural noun used with singular meaning, functioning here as predicate after lakhem ("for you"), forming the phrase "I will become God for you."
• yada'tem ("you will know", H3045) — qal sequential perfect, second person masculine plural; the third link in the chain, presenting knowledge as the outcome of the prior two acts.
• hamotzi ("the one who brings out", H3318) — hiphil (causative) participle with definite article, functioning as a relative clause modifying Yehovah 'eloheikhem ("Yehovah your God"); the participle's aspect presents the action as ongoing/characteristic rather than a single completed past event.

What the text says

The verse is built on three verbs in the sequential perfect (ve-qatalti pattern): laqachti ("I will take"), hayiti ("I will become"), and yada'tem ("you will know"). This chain, marked each time by the narrative ve (H9001), presents the three actions as a linked sequence rather than isolated statements — each result depends on what precedes it.

The clause introduced by ki ("that", H3588A) contains the independent pronoun 'ani ("I", H0589) placed before Yehovah, an emphatic construction identifying the subject explicitly. The phrase Yehovah 'elohei-khem uses elohei in construct form ("God of"), followed by the suffix -khem ("your"). The participle hamotzi' then functions as a descriptive relative clause attached to this name, and its causative (hiphil) stem marks the action of "bringing out" as one performed by the subject upon an object, here 'etkhem ("you"). The final construct chain mi-tachat sivlot Mitzrayim ("from under the burdens of Egypt") stacks two nouns in construct relation, with sivlot ("forced labor/burdens", H5450) specifying the source from which the people are removed.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew lakhem le-elohim ("for you, for God") corresponds to Vulgate "ero vester Deus," but the LXX gives simply καὶ ἔσομαι ὑμῶν ("I will be yours"), without an explicit term for "God" in that clause. The Hebrew participle hamotzi' ("the one bringing out," ongoing aspect) is rendered in the LXX by the aorist participle ἐξαγαγὼν ("having brought out"), shifting the verbal aspect toward a completed past action. The Hebrew noun sivlot ("burdens/forced labor") is rendered in the LXX as καταδυναστείας ("oppression"), a more abstract term than the concrete "burdens" of the Hebrew and Vulgate ("ergastulo," "workhouse/slave-labor").