Exodus 9:33

Summary

Moses leaves Pharaoh and exits the city, then spreads out his hands toward Yehovah. As a result, the thunder and hail stop, and the rain no longer pours down on the earth.

Key words

• va-yifeRos ("and he spread out", H6566) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine singular, continuing the wayyiqtol chain of sequential past actions.
• kapPav ("his hands/palms", H3709G) — feminine dual noun in construct form with the pronominal suffix "his" (H9023), indicating the paired hands functioning as a single grammatical unit.
• va-yachdeLu ("and they ceased", H2308) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine plural, marking the next event in sequence: the stopping of the kolot ("thunder claps", H6963I).
• nitTakh ("it was poured out", H5413) — niphal (passive) perfect verb, describing rain as the recipient of the pouring action rather than an agent, and marked as a completed state (perfect aspect) rather than part of the narrative chain.
• Artza ("toward the earth/ground", H0776G + directional he, H9011) — the directional suffix specifies motion or orientation toward the ground, modifying where the rain does not fall.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of wayyiqtol (narrative past) verbs: va-yeTze ("he went out"), va-yifeRos ("he spread out"), and va-yachdeLu ("they ceased"), each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001) that links sequential events. This chain places Moses' departure from Pharaoh, his gesture with the hands, and the cessation of the storm phenomena in a tight temporal sequence, with no explicit statement of causation—the syntax only marks succession, not "because."

The clause describing the rain, however, breaks this pattern: matar lo nitTakh artza ("rain was not poured out toward the earth") uses a niphal perfect instead of a wayyiqtol. The niphal stem casts the rain as undergoing the action of "pouring" rather than performing it, and the perfect aspect (rather than the narrative form) sets this clause apart syntactically from the preceding chain, framing it as a resulting state rather than a discrete next event in the sequence. The dual noun kapPav ("his hands," H3709G) with the possessive suffix specifies that both hands together are extended, a detail the singular English "hand" or "hands" does not distinguish grammatically.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va-yifeRos kapPav ("he spread out his hands") as ἐξέτεινεν τὰς χεῖρας ("he stretched out the hands"), without an explicit possessive pronoun corresponding to the Hebrew suffix on kapPav. The LXX also adds οὐκέτι ("no longer"/"no more"), matched by the Vulgate's nec ultra ("nor further"), an emphatic temporal marker not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew text, where the negation lo ("not", H3808) alone negates the niphal verb nitTakh.