Exodus 8:25

Summary

Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron and instructs them, using two consecutive imperatives, to go and offer sacrifices to their God, specifying that this sacrifice should take place "in the land" (i.e., within Egypt) rather than elsewhere.

Key words

• va-yiqra ("and he summoned", H7121G) — qal narrative form; the vav prefix chains this verb to the preceding narrative sequence, marking a new event ("and then he summoned").
• lekhu ("go", H1980G) — qal imperative, masculine plural; addressed to the group represented by Moses and Aaron collectively, not simply "come."
• zivchu ("sacrifice", H2076) — qal imperative, masculine plural; paired directly with lekhu to form a double command ("go, sacrifice").
• Elohei-khem ("God of you [pl.]", H0430G + H9026) — Elohim appears in construct plural form followed by a plural possessive suffix, though it refers to a single deity; the construct links it to "you" as the group being addressed.
• ba-aretz ("in the land", H0776G + H9003) — noun with prefixed preposition and definite article; grammatically this reads as "in the land," not "in this land."

What the text says

The verse opens with two verbs in the narrative (vayyiqra, vayyomer) that carry the story forward: Pharaoh "summoned" and then "said." The core of Pharaoh's speech is built on a pair of masculine plural imperatives, lekhu ("go") and zivchu ("sacrifice"), issued back-to-back without a conjunction between them. This asyndetic sequence gives the command an abrupt, direct tone: "Go, sacrifice," rather than a smoother "go and sacrifice."

The phrase le-Elohei-khem ("to your God") uses the plural noun Elohim in construct form with a plural suffix "your" — grammatically plural in form but functioning as a reference to a single deity, consistent with how Elohim operates elsewhere in Biblical Hebrew.

The final phrase, ba-aretz ("in the land"), consists of the preposition be- plus the definite article and the noun "land." Structurally, this is simply "in the land," using the article for definiteness rather than a demonstrative pronoun.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew ba-aretz ("in the land") lacks any demonstrative. The Vulgate renders this as "in terra hac" ("in this land"), explicitly adding the demonstrative "hac." The BSB follows this interpretive tradition with "within this land." The LXX's ἐν τῇ γῇ ("in the land") stays closer to the Hebrew's simple definite-article construction, without a demonstrative equivalent. The SBLIBRE Spanish version renders the phrase as "aquí mismo en el país" ("right here in the country"), an interpretive expansion emphasizing locality that is not explicit in the Hebrew wording itself.