Exodus 8:2

Summary

The verse presents a conditional warning: if Pharaoh continues refusing to release the people, an imminent action will follow — the striking of the entire territory with frogs. The Hebrew uses two participles to frame both the refusal and the impending plague as ongoing or about-to-happen realities rather than simple future events.

Key words

• ma'En ("refusing", H3986) — piel participle, masculine singular. Describes Pharaoh's refusal not as a single past act but as a continuing state or characteristic condition ("the one who refuses/keeps refusing").
• shaLeach ("to send away", H7971H) — piel infinitive construct, governed by the preposition le ("to"). The infinitive with le expresses purpose or complement to the verb of refusing: "refusing to let go."
• hiNeh ("behold", H2009) — interjection. Introduces the consequence with immediacy, drawing attention to what follows as vivid and present.
• noGef ("striking", H5062) — qal participle, masculine singular. Paired with hiNeh, this construction (hinneh + participle) is commonly used in Biblical Hebrew to signal an action about to occur or already underway, not a distant future prediction.
• gevul ("territory", H1366H) — construct form linked to the suffix -kha ("your"), producing "your territory," and further modified by kol ("all") to yield "all your territory."

What the text says

The sentence divides into a protasis (the conditional clause) and an apodosis (the consequence). The protasis, ve'im ma'En 'atah leshaLeach, literally reads "and if refusing [are] you to send away." The word order places the participle ma'En before the pronoun 'atah ("you"), a common pattern for participial clauses functioning as present-tense statements in Hebrew, emphasizing the ongoing nature of the refusal rather than a single moment of decision.

The apodosis begins with hiNeh 'anoKhi noGef, "behold I [am] striking." The combination of the interjection hiNeh with the first-person pronoun 'anoKhi and the participle noGef creates a vivid, immediate declaration — grammatically neither strictly present nor future, but presenting the action as certain and imminent from the speaker's perspective. The object phrase 'et-kol-gevulkha battz'farde'im ("all your territory with the frogs") uses the construct chain kol-gevul ("all of the territory of") plus the possessive suffix, followed by the preposition ba- ("in/with") attached to tz'farde'im ("frogs"), marking the instrument of the action.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ma'En ("refusing") with βούλει ("you wish/want"), shifting the semantic focus from active refusal to desire or willingness. The LXX also uses the present tense τύπτω ("I strike"), while the Vulgate's percutiam ("I will strike") renders it as a future action, differing from the participial immediacy of the Hebrew construction hiNeh...noGef.