Who were the Egyptians who feared the word of the Lord in Exodus 9:20?

Exodus 9 narrates the seventh plague — hail so severe that YHWH calls it unique in all of Egypt's history. Before it falls, a warning goes out: bring your livestock and servants inside, or they will die in the field (Exo 9:19). Two kinds of people are standing in Pharaoh's court when that word lands.

One man moves. The Hebrew text describes him in five words:

הַיָּרֵא אֶת־דְּבַר יְהוָה מֵעַבְדֵי פַּרְעֹה ha-yare et-devar YHWH me-avdei parʿoh "the one fearing the word of YHWH, from the servants of Pharaoh" (Exo 9:20)

Notice the form. The word הַיָּרֵא (ha-yare, H3373) is not a verb — "he feared" — but a participle with a definite article attached: the fearer. That grammatical move turns a single act into an identity. The Torah does not say this man feared on one occasion; it makes "fearer of the word of YHWH" his title, the same way one might say the prophet or the king. He is the fearer.

He is also, unmistakably, an insider. The phrase "from the servants of Pharaoh" (מֵעַבְדֵי פַּרְעֹה) puts him at the center of the resistance. He is not a foreigner on the edge of the story; he belongs to the very court that has been defying YHWH for seven plagues. When the word of warning reaches him there, something shifts. He drives (Hiphil of H5127 — he causes to move) his servants and livestock into shelter before a single stone of hail has fallen. He acts on the word before the word is confirmed.

His counterpart follows in the very next verse: the man who "did not set his heart (לֹא שָׂם לִבּוֹ, H7760 + H3820) to the word of YHWH." He leaves his household in the field. The field (שָׂדֶה, H7704) is the exposed, open place, and the text's verdict is simple: "everything in the field died" (Exo 9:25).

The two men heard the identical word. What divided them was not access to information but what they did with it. The fearer took YHWH's announced word as authoritative reality and reorganized his life around it before the outcome was visible. That is why the Septuagint — the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars centuries before Christ — renders the same man as ὁ φοβούμενος τὸ ῥῆμα κυρίου, "the one fearing the word of the Lord," using a Greek present participle (G5399) that will carry the same identity forward across the canon.

He has no name. He belongs to a nation under judgment. He held no covenant with Israel's God. He is simply described as a man inside Pharaoh's palace who, when YHWH spoke, listened — and lived.

That makes him the first Gentile in the canon to be defined by his fear of God's word. Not the first to be saved, and not the last to fear. But the first to be named by his fear as a title. The figure will reappear from Rahab to the pagan sailors of Jonah to Cornelius in Acts 10, and every time the same vocabulary holds: the one who fears the word of YHWH and acts on it belongs to the company of the living.