Exodus 7:17

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to declare to Pharaoh that a sign will prove his identity: by striking the water of the Nile with the staff in his hand, the water will be turned into blood. The verse combines a divine self-identification formula with an announcement of imminent action.

Key words

• koh ("thus", H3541) — adverb introducing direct speech, the standard opening of a prophetic/divine message formula ("thus says X").
• teda' ("you will know", H3045) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular; the imperfect aspect marks an action not yet completed, framing the knowledge as a future result of what follows.
• makkeh ("about to strike", H5221) — hiphil participle, masculine singular; the participle form expresses an action presented as imminent or in process, rather than a simple future, giving the sense "I am [in the act of being] the one who strikes."
• nehefkhu ("they will be changed", H2015) — niphal (passive/reflexive) sequential perfect, third person plural; the niphal stem removes the grammatical agent from the verb itself, so the water's transformation is expressed as something that happens to it, even though the surrounding narrative attributes the cause to the striking action.
• yadi ("my hand", H3027G + H9020) — noun in construct form with a first-person possessive suffix, literally "hand of me," specifying whose hand holds the staff.

What the text says

The verse opens with the formula koh amar Yehovah ("thus he says, Yehovah"), a fixed introduction marking direct divine speech. The clause be-zot teda' ki ani Yehovah ("by this you will know that I [am] Yehovah") uses the demonstrative zot ("this", H2063) to point forward to the sign about to be described, while ani Yehovah has no verb "to be" in Hebrew — the identification "I [am] Yehovah" is made simply by juxtaposing the pronoun and the name, a construction typical of Hebrew nominal clauses.

The following clause shifts to hinneh ("here!", H2009) plus the independent pronoun anokhi ("I", H0595) and the participle makkeh ("about to strike", H5221). This construction (hinneh + pronoun + participle) is common in Biblical Hebrew for announcing an action that is about to begin or is presented vividly as underway, rather than a simple future statement. The object of the striking is introduced through two chained relative clauses: ba-matteh 'asher be-yadi ("with the staff which [is] in my hand") and 'al ha-mayim 'asher ba-Ye'or ("upon the water which [is] in the Yeor/River"), each relative clause ('asher, H0834A) attaching descriptive information to the preceding noun.

The final verb, nehefkhu ("they will be changed", H2015), is a niphal form functioning here as a sequential perfect continuing the narrative chain begun by the participle; grammatically it presents the water's change into blood as a resulting event, without the verb itself naming an agent — the agency is understood from context (the striking action just described).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew names the river specifically as ha-Ye'or ("the River", H2975G), a term used in Hebrew for the Nile; the LXX renders this with the generic Greek ποταμῷ ("river"), and the Vulgate similarly uses fluminis ("of the river"). The BSB and SBLIBRE explicitly render this as "the Nile" or "el río," making explicit what the Hebrew term implies through context rather than through the word itself.