Genesis 14:11

Summary

Genesis 14:11 reports that the victorious kings seized all the possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with all their food, and then departed. The verse consists of two sequential actions expressed through narrative verb forms: taking and going.

Key words

• va-yiqchu ("and they took", H3947) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive imperfect), marking the first sequential action in the storyline; third person masculine plural, subject implied from context.
• rekhush ("possession of", H7399) — masculine singular noun in construct state, meaning it is grammatically bound to the following names ("possession of Sodom and Gomorrah"), indicating a single collective term for goods/property.
• Sedom ("Sodom", H5467) and Amorah ("Gomorrah", H6017) — proper nouns joined by the conjunction va ("and", H9002), functioning as the two entities whose possessions were taken.
• okhlam ("their food", H0400 + H9028) — noun in construct form with a third person masculine plural pronominal suffix ("their"), specifying that the food belonged to the inhabitants of the two cities.
• va-yeilekhu ("and they went", H1980) — second qal narrative verb, closing the sequence of actions ("took... then went").

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built entirely on narrative vav-consecutive verbs, a structural feature that presents the two verbs va-yiqchu ("and they took") and va-yeilekhu ("and they went") as sequential events in the flow of the story: first the seizing, then the departure. Both verbs share the same third person masculine plural subject, which the Hebrew leaves grammatically implicit — no separate pronoun or explicit subject noun appears in this verse; the subject must be recovered from the preceding narrative context.

The object of the taking is expressed through two parallel construct chains, each introduced by the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated): first kol-rekhush Sedom va-Amorah ("all the possession of Sodom and Gomorrah"), then kol-okhlam ("all their food"). The construct state of rekhush and okhel ("food") ties these nouns tightly to what follows — the city names in the first case, the pronominal suffix "their" in the second — producing a compact listing of what was taken rather than two independent clauses.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the verb as singular (elaben, "he took") where the Hebrew va-yiqchu is plural ("they took"), shifting the grammatical subject from a group to an individual. The LXX also omits an equivalent for the second Hebrew verb va-yeilekhu ("and they went"), ending the verse instead with apēlthon ("they departed") in third person plural, which does not match the singular verb used earlier in the same LXX sentence. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's plural verbs (Tulerunt... abierunt), preserving both actions as here rendered.