Exodus 9:18

Summary

God announces through Moses that at a specific time the next day he will send an extraordinarily severe hailstorm on Egypt, one without precedent since the nation's founding. The verse combines an announcement of imminent action with a superlative comparison to Egypt's entire history.

Key words

• hi.va.se.Da ("was founded", H3245) — niphal form describing Egypt's founding; the niphal stem marks the verb as passive/undergone rather than performed by an agent named in the text.
• mam.Tir ("[am] about to rain down", H4305) — hiphil participle, the causative stem showing the subject actively causing rain to fall (rather than rain simply occurring); as a participle it expresses an action in progress or about to unfold, not a simple future.
• ka.Ved ("heavy", H3515) + me.'Od ("very", H3966) — adjective intensified by an adverb-like modifier, building the description of the hail's severity through stacked qualifiers rather than a single superlative word.
• 'a.Sher ("which", H0834A) with lo' ("not", H3808) and ha.Yah ("it has been", H1961) — a relative clause using a qal perfect verb to state a completed, unbroken historical fact: nothing "has been" like this hail.
• hi.NE.ni (hi. "here" H2005 + Ni "I" H9040) — the interjection with attached first-person suffix, literally "here-I", functioning to draw attention to the speaker's imminent action.

What the text says

The sentence opens with hinneni ("here I") directly attached to the participle mamtir ("about to rain down/causing rain"), a common Hebrew construction pairing this interjection with a participle to signal an action the speaker is on the verge of performing. The hiphil stem of mamtir marks the action as causative — the subject makes the hail fall, rather than the hail falling on its own.

The core noun phrase barad kaved me'od ("hail heavy very") stacks an adjective and an intensifying adverb to describe the hail's severity, rather than relying on a single superlative form. This description is then anchored temporally by a relative clause: asher lo hayah khamohu ("which has not been like it"), using the qal perfect hayah to assert a fact considered complete and unbroken across all prior time in Egypt.

The closing phrase le-min ha-yom hivvasedah ve-ad attah ("from the day it was founded until now") uses the niphal form hivvasedah ("was founded") to describe Egypt's founding without naming an agent, framing the entire span of Egypt's existence as the reference point for the comparison.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders hivvasedah ("was founded") with ektistai ("has been created"), a verb tied to creation language rather than the Hebrew's more architectural sense of founding/establishing. The Vulgate's fundata est ("was founded") stays closer to the Hebrew's structural sense. The LXX also ends with "until the day" (ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας) without an explicit equivalent to attah ("now", H6258), while the Vulgate's usque in praesens tempus ("until the present time") and the Hebrew's ve-ad attah both mark the present moment explicitly.