Exodus 9:34

Summary

Exodus 9:34 narrates that Pharaoh, upon observing that the rain, hail, and thunder had stopped, repeated his sinning and made his heart heavy — a state shared by both himself and his officials.

Key words

• va-yosef ("he repeated/added", H3254G) — hiphil narrative form; the causative stem here conveys the sense of "adding to" an action, paired with the infinitive that follows.
• la-chato ("to sin", H2398) — qal infinitive introduced by the preposition la ("to"); together with vayosef it forms the idiom "he added to sin," i.e., he sinned again.
• va-yakhbed ("he made heavy", H3513H) — hiphil narrative form of the root meaning "heavy," the same verb used elsewhere in the plague narrative for the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.
• libbo ("his heart", H3820A + H9023) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, the direct object of the heart-hardening action.
• hu ("he", H1931) and va'avadav ("and his servants", H5650 + H9023) — the compound subject placed after the verb phrase, specifying who is included in this hardened state.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative chain typical of Hebrew storytelling: va-yar ("he saw", H7200G) introduces Pharaoh's perception, followed by a causal clause with ki ("that/if", H3588A) explaining what he saw — that ha-matar ("the rain", H4306), ha-barad ("the hail", H1259), and ha-qolot ("the thunder claps", H6963I) had chadal ("ceased", H2308), a qal perfect indicating completed action prior to Pharaoh's observation.

The second half contains two narrative verbs in sequence: va-yosef la-chato ("he repeated to sin") and va-yakhbed libbo ("he made his heart heavy"). Both are hiphil forms carrying causative force. The subject hu va'avadav ("he and his servants", H1931 + H5650) appears after the verb va-yakhbed, positioned to clarify who shares in this hardened condition — Pharaoh himself and his officials together.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the final clause as ἐβάρυνεν αὐτοῦ τὴν καρδίαν καὶ τῶν θεραπόντων αὐτοῦ ("he hardened his heart and that of his servants"), making the servants' hearts a second direct object of the hardening verb, whereas the Hebrew places hu va'avadav as a compound subject following libbo ("his heart"), leaving the grammatical relationship between the servants and the hardened heart less explicit. The Vulgate condenses the passage differently, rendering only auxit peccatum ("he increased sin"), which combines the ideas of repeated sinning and heart-hardening into a single expression without separately naming the heart or the servants in this clause.