Exodus 8:13

Summary

The verse reports that Yehovah acted according to the word Moses had spoken, causing the frogs that had overrun Egypt to die. The death of the frogs is specified as occurring in three locations: houses, villages/courtyards, and fields.

Key words

• va-Ya'as ("and he did", H6213A) — qal narrative verb marking sequential action: Yehovah's response follows directly from what precedes it in the narrative chain.
• ki-d'var ("according to the word of", H1697G) — construct form linking the noun "word" to Moses, indicating that Yehovah's action corresponds to a specific spoken content attributed to Moses.
• va-yamutu ("and they died", H4191) — qal narrative verb, third person plural, continuing the narrative sequence begun by the first verb.
• ha-tzfarde'im ("the frogs", H6854) — masculine plural noun with definite article, referring back to the frogs already introduced in the surrounding narrative.
• chatzerot ("villages/courtyards", H2691A) — common gender plural noun, one of three terms marking the spatial distribution of where the frogs died.

What the text says

The verse is built on two sequential narrative verbs joined by the vav-consecutive construction (va-Ya'as... va-yamutu), a standard Hebrew mechanism for presenting one event following directly from another: first Yehovah's action, then the frogs' death as its result. The phrase ki-d'var Mosheh ("according to the word of Moses") uses a construct chain to tie Yehovah's action explicitly to a prior utterance of Moses, though the content of that word is not restated here—it is assumed known from context.

The second clause lists three locations using the same syntactic pattern: the preposition min ("from") followed by a definite noun — min-ha-batim ("from the houses"), min-ha-chatzerot ("from the villages"), and min-ha-sadot ("from the fields"). This triple repetition of min with parallel definite nouns creates a rhetorical enumeration emphasizing the totality of the frogs' removal across all inhabited and cultivated spaces, rather than a single locale.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew ki-d'var Mosheh ("according to the word of Moses") is rendered in the LXX as καθάπερ εἶπεν Μωυσῆς ("just as Moses said"), shifting from a nominal construct ("word of") to a verbal clause ("said"). The Vulgate's juxta verbum Moysi ("according to the word of Moses") stays closer to the Hebrew's nominal construction. The BSB's "as Moses requested" introduces an interpretive nuance (request) not explicitly present in the Hebrew davar ("word", H1697G), which denotes speech or word generally, not specifically a request.