Leviticus 26:13

Summary

Yehovah identifies himself as the God of the addressees and recalls three actions: bringing them out of Egypt, breaking the bars of their yoke, and making them walk upright. The verse closes the section on blessings for obedience with a historical self-identification formula.

Key words

• hotzeti ("I brought out", H3318) — hiphil perfect, 1st person: a causative completed action, "I caused [you] to go out," emphasizing Yehovah as the direct agent of the exodus, not a passive event.
• mihyot ("from being", H1961) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed min ("from"): expresses the state they were in ("from their being slaves"), giving a purpose/circumstance nuance rather than a simple verb clause.
• 'avadim ("slaves", H5650) — masculine plural noun, predicate of the infinitive clause, describing the condition from which they were removed.
• 'eshbor ("I broke", H7665) — qal narrative (vav-consecutive) 1st person: continues the chain of completed actions begun with hotzeti, marking sequential narrative action ("and then I broke").
• qomemiyut ("upright", H6968) — feminine singular noun used adverbially, describing the manner of walking that results from the broken yoke; it has no verbal or prepositional marking, functioning as a bare adverbial complement to 'olekh ("I made walk", H1980I).

What the text says

The verse opens with the self-presentation formula 'ani YHWH 'elohei-khem ("I [am] Yehovah, God of you-plural"), using a construct chain ('elohei + suffix -khem) rather than a separate possessive phrase. This is followed by a relative clause introduced by 'asher ("who"), which houses three verbs in sequence: hotzeti (hiphil perfect, "I brought out"), 'eshbor (qal narrative, "I broke"), and 'olekh (hiphil narrative, "I made walk"). The perfect verb hotzeti sets the main completed action, while the two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs that follow continue the same time-frame as consequential steps, producing a tight causal chain: bringing out → breaking the yoke-bars → making walk upright.

The phrase mihyot lahem 'avadim ("from their being slaves") uses an infinitive construct with min, which describes the state left behind rather than stating a discrete verbal event — this is a grammatical construction with no single-word English equivalent, often rendered as a purpose or result clause ("so that they would not be slaves") though the Hebrew infinitive itself denotes the prior condition, not intention. The final word, qomemiyut ("upright"), is a rare abstract noun functioning adverbially, describing the manner of the resulting walk without any verb of its own — the walking-upright is expressed as a noun-modifier construction rather than a full predicate.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders mihyot lahem 'avadim with a genitive absolute, ὄντων ὑμῶν δούλων ("you being slaves"), staying close to the Hebrew's stative infinitive. The Vulgate instead supplies a purpose clause, ne serviretis eis ("so that you would not serve them"), making explicit a purpose that the Hebrew infinitive construction leaves implicit. For qomemiyut, the LXX has μετὰ παρρησίας ("with boldness/openness"), diverging from the Hebrew's physical sense of upright posture, while the Vulgate's incederetis erecti ("that you might walk erect") and most modern translations follow the Hebrew's bodily-posture meaning more closely.