What Does Exodus 10:6 Mean?
They will fill your houses, and the houses of all your servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians, which your fathers did not see, nor your fathers' fathers, since the day they were upon the ground until this day. And he turned and went out from Pharaoh.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians; which neither thy fathers, nor thy fathers’ fathers have seen, since the day that they were upon the earth unto this day. And he turned himself, and went out from Pharaoh.THE KEY
Before Israel goes out from Egypt, Moses goes out from Pharaoh, the verse plants the book’s great departure in its final verb.
THE MEANING
The verse holds two movements together: locusts are promised entry into every Egyptian household, at a scale beyond ancestral memory, while Moses turns and leaves Pharaoh. The warning presses out from the court toward the homes of the ruler’s servants and the people he governs.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a ruler can keep others confined while keeping the consequences outside his own house.
THE ROOT
וַיֵּצֵא
vayyetse
GROWS FROM
יצא
y-ṣ-ʾ
To go out, come forth, or emerge.
“went out” in this verse is vayyetse. Moses’s exit uses the same root that later describes Israel going out from Egypt. The book’s collective departure is already echoed in this solitary movement away from Pharaoh.
ALSO GROWS
yatsa: To go out or come forth.
יָצָא
This is the root verb behind Moses’s departure and Israel’s later going out.
yetzi'ah: A going out or departure.
יְצִיאָה
It makes departure a named movement, not merely a change of location.
motsa: An exit or point of emergence; also an origin.
מוֹצָא
The same root can name both the way out and the point from which something emerges.
מִצְרַיִם
Mitzrayim
GROWS FROM
צ־ר־ר
ṣ-r-r
To bind, press, or enclose in constriction.
“Egyptians” in this verse is Mitzrayim. Mitzrayim is heard through tzar, narrowness, with the dual ending -ayim: the two narrows. Here the swarm reaches the houses of all Egypt, pressing into the very spaces meant to shelter the people under that rule.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow, tight, or constricted.
צַר
It carries the narrowness heard in the name Mitzrayim.
metzar: A narrow place or strait; distress.
מֵצַר
It gives the name’s constriction a lived shape: a place where there is little room.
וּמָלְאוּ
u-male'u
GROWS FROM
מלא
m-l-ʾ
To fill or be full.
“fill” in this verse is u-male'u. The root names fullness, not just arrival in a space. Its recurrence in the earlier plague, where Egyptian houses are full of flies, makes this threatened swarm an intensified invasion of domestic life.
ALSO GROWS
melo': Fullness; that which fills.
מְלֹא
It shows the root’s focus on a space brought to fullness.
mille': To fill or complete.
מִלֵּא
It shares the action behind the locusts filling every named household.
THE PATTERN
A calamity becomes total when it enters the places people call shelter and reaches a scale no generation can remember.
And they did so, for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod and struck the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.In the city they rush, on the wall they run, upon the houses they climb, through the windows they come like a thief.And there are voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and there is a great shaking, such as has not been since humankind came to be upon the ground, so mighty a shaking, and so great.THE THREAD
And it came to be at the end of four hundred and thirty years, and on this very bone of the day it came to be, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.The final verb in Exodus 10:6 and “went out” here share the root יצא (yatsa), to go out. Moses’s brief departure from Pharaoh carries the same motion that later becomes the people’s departure from Egypt.
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