Exodus 8:15

Summary

The verse reports Pharaoh's reaction once he perceived that the plague's effects had ceased: seeing the revachah ("respite", H7309), he intensified the hardness of his heart and refused to listen, in fulfillment of what Yehovah (H3068G) had previously spoken.

Key words

• va-yar ("and he saw", H7200G) — qal narrative form; opens the sequence of events with Pharaoh as the perceiving subject.
• revachah ("respite", H7309) — feminine singular noun with definite article ha (H9009), naming the specific condition Pharaoh perceived.
• hakhbed ("he made heavy", H3513H) — hiphil infinitive absolute; grammatically an infinitive form, but functioning here as a finite verb continuing the narrative chain, which intensifies the causative sense of "making heavy."
• libbo ("his heart", H3820A + H9023) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, marked by the object particle 'et (H0853), identifying the heart as the direct object of the hardening action.
• ka'asher dibber ("as he had said", H0834D + H1696G) — relative clause with piel perfect verb, linking Pharaoh's action back to a prior divine statement.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a chain of qal narrative verbs (vayyar, "and he saw") followed by a subordinate clause introduced by ki (H3588A, "that"), which reports the content of Pharaoh's perception: hayetah ha-revachah, "the respite had come to be" — a qal perfect denoting a completed state already in place when Pharaoh looked. The next clause shifts construction: instead of a standard finite verb, the text uses the hiphil infinitive absolute hakhbed ("to make heavy") functioning in place of a finite past-tense verb, a construction that carries forward the narrative sequence while giving weight to the causative action — Pharaoh himself is the one causing the heaviness of libbo ("his heart"), the direct object marked by 'et.

The final clause, velo shama' alehem ("and he did not listen to them"), uses a third-person plural suffix -hem (H9038) without naming its referents explicitly in this verse; the Hebrew simply says "to them." The concluding relative clause ka'asher dibber Yehovah ("as Yehovah had spoken") uses the piel perfect of dibber (H1696G), marking completed prior speech, and closes the verse by tying Pharaoh's action to an earlier divine pronouncement.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew hakhbed is an active causative form ("he made [his heart] heavy"), and the Vulgate matches this with the active ingravavit cor suum ("he made his own heart heavy"). The LXX, however, renders this with a passive verb, ἐβαρύνθη ἡ καρδία αὐτοῦ ("his heart was made heavy"), shifting the grammatical subject from Pharaoh acting upon his heart to the heart itself undergoing the action. Additionally, the Hebrew alehem ("to them") gives no explicit antecedent in this verse, while the BSB English translation supplies "Moses and Aaron" as an interpretive addition not present in the Hebrew wording itself.