Exodus 4:20

4:20 Then Moses took ¹  his wife and sons ²  and put them on a donkey and headed back ³  to the land of Egypt, and Moses took the staff of God in his hand.

Exodus 22:4

22:4 If the stolen item should in fact be found ⁴  alive in his possession, ⁵  whether it be an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he must pay back double. ⁶ 

Exodus 32:15

32:15 Moses turned and went down from the mountain with ⁷  the two tablets of the testimony in his hands. The tablets were written on both sides – they were written on the front and on the back.

[4:20]  ¹ tn Heb “And Moses took.”

[4:20]  ² sn Only Gershom has been mentioned so far. The other son’s name will be explained in chapter 18. The explanation of Gershom’s name was important to Moses’ sojourn in Midian. The explanation of the name Eliezer fits better in the later chapter (18:2-4).

[4:20]  ³ tn The verb would literally be rendered “and returned”; however, the narrative will record other happenings before he arrived in Egypt, so an ingressive nuance fits here – he began to return, or started back.

[22:4]  ⁴ tn The construction uses a Niphal infinitive absolute and a Niphal imperfect: if it should indeed be found. Gesenius says that in such conditional clauses the infinitive absolute has less emphasis, but instead emphasizes the condition on which some consequence depends (see GKC 342-43 §113.o).

[22:4]  ⁵ tn Heb “in his hand.”

[22:4]  ⁶ sn He must pay back one for what he took, and then one for the penalty – his loss as he was inflicting a loss on someone else.

[32:15]  ⁷ tn The disjunctive vav (ו) serves here as a circumstantial clause indicator.