Exodus 8:3

Summary

The verse announces that the Nile will swarm with frogs, which will then rise up and enter every part of the addressee's domestic and social space — house, bedroom, bed, the houses of officials and people, ovens, and kneading troughs.

Key words

• sha.Ratz ("it will swarm", H8317) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by a prior command; it describes the river producing an abundance/mass of creatures.
• tze.far.de.'Im ("frogs", H6854) — masculine plural noun, the subject swarming from the river.
• 'a.Lu ("they will go up", H5927G) and Va.'u ("they will go in", H0935G) — two sequential perfect verbs in series, marking successive stages of movement: first ascent (from the water), then entry (into structures).
• vei.Te.kha ("house of you", H1004B + H9021) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, the first in a chain of possessed nouns (house, chamber, bed, ovens, troughs) all marked "your" via the repeated suffix -kha.
• mish.'a.ro.Tei.kha ("your kneading troughs", H4863) — feminine plural construct noun with suffix, the final item in the list, referring to containers for preparing dough.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of verbs joined by the narrative/sequential vav (H9001/H9002), a construction that presents one action following another as a single continuous consequence: sha.Ratz ("it will swarm") → 'a.Lu ("they will go up") → Va.'u ("they will go in"). This verbal sequence moves the frogs spatially: first they proliferate in the river, then rise up out of it, then enter into human spaces. Each subsequent location is introduced by the preposition be- ("in") or 'al- ("on", H5921A) followed by a noun in construct state bearing the second-person masculine singular suffix -kha ("your"). This produces a long list — house, bedroom, bed, house of officials, people, ovens, kneading troughs — each explicitly marked as belonging to the addressee through the repeated possessive suffix, reinforcing that the intrusion reaches every level of personal and domestic life, from the most private (the bed) to the most communal (ovens and kneading troughs used for food preparation).

The construct chains (e.g., cha.Dar mish.ka.ve.kha, "chamber of your lying down") show Hebrew's typical way of forming compound expressions like "bedroom" through two nouns in sequence rather than a single compound word.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ha.y.'Or ("the River", H2975G) simply as ποταμὸς ("river"), without the definite article marking it as a specific, known river (the Nile) as the Hebrew does. The Vulgate's fluvius similarly omits explicit specification. The LXX also renders be.ve.te.kha as εἰς τοὺς οἴκους σου (plural "houses"), where the Hebrew uses a singular construct noun vei.Te.kha ("house of you").