Unless you read and understand Hebrew, the glaring question from these verses will be lost on you. Let me explain.

The Hebrew in verse 9 for “pursued” is vayirdifu and the Hebrew for “overtook” is vayasigu. Notice how both words end with the letter u which generates an “oo” sound. In Hebrew, this tells us that the words “pursued” and overtook are plural as they are referring to the Egyptian army. No problem here at all.

Yet in verse 10, the very next verse, it used the verb traveling which in Hebrew is nosea. Notice it does not end with the “oo” sound but rather with an “ah” sound. The “ah” at the end of this word makes the word singular as if there was one single Egyptian pursuing the Jewish people who just left Egypt!

To summarize: The verbs in verse 9 are in plural as we would expect when referring to the Egyptian army yet in verse 10 when referring to the same Egyptian army the verb is in the singular. Why?

The Egyptian pursuit of the Jewish people was unified in purpose and they were acting as “one heart, one person” hence the singular language. While it was obviously a plurality of people, it was a singularity of purpose.

The Egyptians were completely dedicated to destroying the Jewish people. This unified purpose is what made them a very dangerous threat to the just freed slaves.

The emotion of hatred compelled the Egyptians to act so irrationally in their pursuit of the Jewish people. They had witnessed ten plagues culminating in the plague of the death of the first born and yet, here they are once again tormenting the Jewish people. It makes no sense.

It doesn’t make sense but that is what emotional, irrational hatred will do to a person or a nation. When Hitler stirred up Germany by claiming that the Jews were the source of every problem in Germany and the world at large, the Jewish population in Germany was less that 1%. Is that at all rational to blame all of Germany’s problem on less than 1% of the population?

Hatred and getting angry closes off rational thinking. When you lose your cool it is easy to say things that you will regret later when cooler heads prevail. Poor decisions are made and sometimes they cannot be reversed, which is tragic.

Ultimately the hatred led the Egyptians to follow the Jewish people into dry land between two walls of water. We all know how it ends with the waters coming crashing down and drowning the Egyptians. This is a stark and strong reminder to us all that hatred does not have a happy ending.