Genesis 11:3

Summary

The verse reports the builders' proposal to make bricks and bake them, and then states the result: brick replaced stone and bitumen replaced mortar in their construction materials. The sentence moves from direct speech (the plan) to narrated outcome (the materials used).

Key words

• 'ish ("each", H0376I) — paired with 'el-re'ehu, forms a reciprocal idiom: "each [said] to his neighbor," i.e., "to one another."
• re'ehu ("neighbor", H7453) — construct noun + suffix "his," completing the reciprocal phrase "his neighbor" = "one another."
• havah ("give", H3051) with paragogic he — an imperative used as an interjection, "come!" / "come now!", introducing the proposal rather than a literal command to give something.
• nilbenah ("let us make bricks", H3835B) — first-person plural form expressing collective intention, "let us brick" (a verb built directly from the noun for brick).
• tehi / hayah ("became" / "was", H1961) — the same root appears twice, once as narrative tehi ("and it became") and once as perfect hayah ("it was"), creating two parallel result-clauses.

What the text says

The Hebrew opens with the narrative verb va-yo'meru ("and they said"), followed by the reciprocal phrase 'ish 'el-re'ehu ("each to his neighbor"), a common Hebrew idiom for expressing mutual speech among a group without naming individuals. The proposal itself uses the interjection havah ("come!") followed by two first-person plural forms, nilbenah ("let us make bricks") and nisrephah ("let us burn"), paired with the cognate noun levenim ("bricks") and the infinitive-construct phrase li-srephah ("for burning"). This repetition of the root for "brick" and "burn" in both verb and noun forms is a stylistic feature not easily preserved in translation, since English and Latin must use different words for the verb ("make bricks," "faciamus lateres") and its underlying noun.

The second half of the verse reports the outcome using two clauses built on the same verb hayah ("to be/become"), first in narrative form (tehi, "and it became") for the brick-to-stone substitution, then in perfect form (hayah, "it was") for the bitumen-to-mortar substitution. Both clauses use the preposition le- ("to/for") to mark the substituted material: "the brick became for them for stone," "the bitumen was for them for mortar." This doubled le- construction marks equivalence or substitution, a nuance that translations render simply as "instead of."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew's reciprocal phrase 'ish 'el-re'ehu ("each to his neighbor") is preserved in the Vulgate's alter ad proximum suum ("one to his neighbor"), but the provided LXX text reads only ἄνθρωπος ("a man," singular), without an equivalent reciprocal phrase, suggesting a shorter or differently structured clause at this point in the Greek. The Hebrew's parallel hayah-clauses (bricks becoming stone, bitumen becoming mortar) appear in the LXX as two clauses using ἐγένετο ("became") and ἦν ("was"), matching the Hebrew's two-verb structure, while the Vulgate uses habuerunt... pro ("they had... instead of") for both, collapsing the two-verb distinction into a single construction.