Exodus 22:27

Summary

The verse explains why a garment taken in pledge must be returned by nightfall: it is the poor man's only covering, the single cloak that protects his skin, and without it he has nothing to lie down in. The passage closes with a divine promise to hear his cry, grounded in the divine attribute of being chanun ("gracious", H2587).

Key words

• khesut ("covering", H3682) — feminine singular construct noun, paired with the suffix "his" to mean "his covering"; it names the garment as protective covering, not merely clothing.
• levaddah ("for it alone", from H0905H + suffix H9034) — an idiomatic construct expression meaning "by itself / alone"; here it stresses exclusivity — this is the only covering the man has.
• simlah ("cloak", H8071) — construct form "his cloak", parallel to khesut, naming the same garment from a different angle (outer wrap vs. protective covering).
• yishkav ("he will lie down", H7901H) — qal imperfect, expresses a future/ongoing situation; used in the rhetorical question "in what will he lie down?"
• chanun ("gracious", H2587) — masculine singular adjective, predicate of the pronoun 'ani ("I", H0589), forming the closing self-description "for I am gracious."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a doubled emphatic pattern: hi' ("it/she", H1931) appears twice, each time immediately preceding a feminine noun in construct form — khesuto and simlato. This repetition creates a parallel structure: "IT is his covering... IT is his cloak for his skin," underscoring that the same single garment serves both functions (general covering and protection of the skin). The phrase levaddah ("for it alone") reinforces that no other covering exists — the construct chain here does not name a possessor but expresses exclusivity, an idiom rendered in translations as "the only one he has."

The rhetorical question bameh yishkav ("in what will he lie down?") uses the imperfect verb yishkav to project a hypothetical future situation without the garment, implying a stated consequence rather than describing an actual event. The sequence then shifts into narrative chain-form with vehayah ("and it will be", sequential perfect) and veshama'ti ("and I will hear", sequential perfect), both continuing the logical/temporal sequence set up by the conditional ki ("if", H3588A) clauses. The final clause states the reason for hearing: ki chanun ani, "for I am gracious" — an adjectival predicate construction, not a verbal one, describing a quality rather than an action.