Exodus 26:3

Summary

The verse describes how the curtains (yeriot, H3407) of the tabernacle are to be arranged: five of them joined to one another, and the other five joined to one another in the same way. The Hebrew expresses this joining through a distributive idiom rather than a simple statement of quantity.

Key words

• yeri'ot ("curtains", H3407) — feminine plural noun, the fabric panels being described; appears twice, once with the definite article (ha, H9009) for the first group and once without it for the second.
• tihyeina ("they will be", H1961) — qal imperfect, third person feminine plural; marks the ongoing/future state the curtains will be in, governing the participle that follows.
• choverot ("joined", H2266) — qal participle feminine plural, appearing twice; describes the curtains as being in a continuous state of "joining" rather than a completed act of joining.
• ishah ("each/woman", H0802I) — feminine singular noun used idiomatically to mean "each one," pairing with achotah to form the reciprocal expression.
• achotah ("her sister", H0269 + H9024) — construct noun with pronominal suffix; combined with ishah, forms the fixed idiom "each to her sister," meaning "one to another."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two parallel halves. The first half opens with chamesh ("five of", H2568) in construct with ha-yeri'ot ("the curtains", H3407), specifying a subset of five from the total group of curtains. The verb tihyeina (H1961), a feminine plural imperfect of "to be," sets up a durative or resultative sense — the curtains "will be" in the state described next. That state is given by the participle choverot (H2266), "joined," which in Hebrew grammar denotes an ongoing condition rather than a single completed action.

The reciprocity of the joining is expressed through the idiom ishah el-achotah — literally "a woman to her sister" (H0802I + H0413 + H0269 + H9024) — a standard Biblical Hebrew way of saying "each one to the next" when referring to feminine-gender objects like curtains. This idiom appears in both halves of the verse, first for the group of five curtains introduced with the definite article (ha-yeri'ot), and second for the remaining five curtains without the article (ve-chamesh yeri'ot), since they have not yet been referred to previously in the sentence and are here introduced as a new referent.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the "each to her sister" idiom (ishah el-achotah, H0802I/H0269) with ἡ ἑτέρα ἐκ τῆς ἑτέρας ("the one from the other") and ἑτέρα τῇ ἑτέρᾳ ("one to another"), replacing the Hebrew's feminine kinship metaphor with a generic reciprocal pronoun. The Vulgate similarly abstracts the idiom, using sibi jungentur mutuo ("joined to one another mutually") and nexu simili cohærebunt ("will cohere with similar binding"), losing the "sister" imagery present in the Hebrew achotah (H0269).