Leviticus 25:55

Summary

This verse gives the rationale for the preceding manumission laws: the people of Israel belong to God as servants, not as slaves to other masters, because he brought them out of Egypt. The verse closes with the self-identification formula "I am Yehovah your God."

Key words

• avaDim ("servants", H5650) — plural noun, first occurrence, stating a general status: "to me the sons of Israel are servants."
• avaDai ("my servants", H5650) — same noun, now in construct form with the 1st person suffix -i ("my"), narrowing the claim from general to possessive: not servants in general, but my servants specifically.
• Hem ("they", H1992) — independent personal pronoun added after avaDai, creating emphasis that a suffix alone would not carry; the construction avaDai Hem reads literally "my servants, they [are]."
• hoTzeti ("I brought out", H3318H) — Hiphil (causative) perfect, 1st person singular: the causative stem marks the action as one YHWH caused to happen (he "caused them to go out"), and the perfect aspect presents it as a completed event.
• 'a.Ni ("I", H0589) — independent pronoun preceding Yehovah, reinforcing the subject in the closing self-identification formula 'ani Yehovah 'eloheikhem ("I [am] Yehovah your God").

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two parallel halves before the closing formula. The first half, ki-li benei-Yisra'El avaDim, states the claim plainly: "for to me [belong] the sons of Israel [as] servants." The second half, avaDai Hem, repeats the same noun eved but now attached to the 1st-person suffix and reinforced by the independent pronoun Hem ("they"). This doubling — general statement followed by emphatic restatement with pronoun — is a feature of Hebrew syntax that intensifies the claim of possession without needing an additional verb.

The relative clause asher hoTzeti otam me'Eretz Mitzrayim ("whom I brought out from the land of Egypt") supplies the justification for the claim of possession: the causative-perfect verb hoTzeti presents the exodus as the completed act that grounds the relationship. The verse ends with the formula 'ani Yehovah 'eloheikhem, in which the independent pronoun 'ani placed before the divine name adds emphasis to the self-declaration.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew noun avaDim / avaDai with two different Greek words — oiketai ("household servants") for the first and paides ("servants/children") for the second — where the Hebrew uses the same root (eved, H5650) both times. The Vulgate and the LXX text given here both end at "out of the land of Egypt" and do not include the closing clause 'ani Yehovah 'eloheikhem ("I am Yehovah your God"), which is present in the Hebrew (MT) and reflected in the Spanish and English translations supplied (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE).