''With a strong hand and an outstretched arm'' the meaning of the expression byd hzqh wbzrw' ntwyh

Abstract

The expression ''with a strong hand and an outstretched arm'' is usually understood as being an expression of the power of God. There are various suggestions as to which aspect of his power is indicated: The power of inflicting plague and sickness or his power as a warrior - or whether the expression is used as a counterpart to Egyptian royal terminology. It is suggested here that the expression does refer to the power of inflicting plague and sickness, for the following reasons: ''With a strong hand and an outstretched arm'' is a parallelism between two collocations of words, ''strong hand'' and ''outstretched hand'' (''arm'' + the verb ''stretch out''). When the two collocations, both containing the word ''hand'', were made to form a parallelism, the element ''arm'' was the added to one of them to achieve variation between the units of the parallelism. The element ''arm'', which often has a military connotation, is then an extraneous component to the expression. The outcome of ''stretching out the hand'' in the Pentateuch and the historical books is miraculous events, some of these being a number of the plagues. The expression does not seem to have any military connotation in the account of the Exodus. A comparison with the literatures of other Semitic languages shows that in the ancient Near East not only ''the hand'' of a deity inflicting plague and sickness can be found, but actually ''a strong hand''. In most of the occurrences of the expression in the Pentateuch apparently the entire experience of Israel in Egypt is signified. Only in Exod 3,19; 6,1; (where we cannot be sure whether the arm belongs to YHWH or to Pharaoh) and 6,6 the expression is connected to specific traditions in the account of the Exodus, and these are exactly the plague traditions.