Exodus 8:21

Summary

The verse presents a conditional warning: if Pharaoh does not send away "my people," the swarm ('arov) will come upon him, his servants, his people, and his houses. The consequence is described as total — filling the houses of Egypt and covering the ground itself.

Key words

• ki 'im (H3588B / H0518B) — "that / if... except" — a compound conditional construction introducing the protasis ("if not..."); the double particle intensifies the conditional-negative sense ("if you are not...").
• meshaLeach ("letting go", H7971H) — Piel participle of the root for "to send," describing an ongoing/customary action ("you are [not] letting go"); the participle form marks Pharaoh's continuous refusal rather than a single completed act.
• mashLiach ("about to send", H7971G) — Hiphil participle of the same root, contrasting with the Piel above; here it expresses imminent divine causative action ("I am about to send/cause to go").
• hinneni (hin- + -ni, H2005 + H9040) — the interjection "here" plus first-person suffix, forming the emphatic "here I am [about to]," marking immediacy and certainty of the coming action.
• he'arov ("the swarm", H6157, with article H9009) — masculine singular noun with definite article, referring to a specific known entity ("the swarm"), repeated twice in the verse to mark both its dispatch and its filling effect.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence pairs two participles from the same root (shalach, "to send") in different stems: meshaLeach (Piel) describes Pharaoh's action of "sending away/releasing" the people, while mashLiach (Hiphil) describes the speaker's own action of "sending against." This root-play is not visible in translation but creates a rhetorical mirroring: Pharaoh's refusal to "send" is answered by a divine "sending" of the swarm. The double conditional particle ki 'im with the negative 'einekha ("you are not") sets up a strong contrary-to-expectation condition — "but if you are not letting my people go."

The list of targets — "you," "your servants," "your people," "your houses" — is constructed with repeated prepositional phrases (be- + suffix) coordinated by vav, producing a cumulative, escalating enumeration rather than a single generalized statement. The sequence then shifts to a narrative vav + sequential perfect (mal'u, "they will be full," H4390), continuing the action logically as a resulting consequence. The final clause adds gam ha'adamah ("also the ground," H1571 + H0127G), extending the effect beyond dwellings to the ground itself, specified by the relative clause 'asher hem 'aleiha ("on which they are").

Differences between versions

The LXX renders he'arov as kynomyian ("dog-fly"), a specific insect term, where the Hebrew 'arov (H6157) is a generic term for "swarm" without specifying species. The Vulgate similarly interprets it as muscarum ("of flies") and adds diversi generis ("of different kinds"), an interpretive expansion not present in the Hebrew noun itself. The BSB and SBLIBRE follow this insect-specific tradition ("flies"), while the Hebrew text itself uses only the unspecified term "the swarm."