Genesis 14:17

Summary

The verse narrates that the king of Sodom went out to meet Abram after Abram's return from defeating Kedorlaomer and the allied kings, and locates this meeting at the Valley of Shaveh, identified in an explanatory clause as "the King's Valley."

Key words

• yetze ("he went out", H3318) — qal verb in narrative form, marking the main sequential action of the sentence: the king of Sodom's departure.
• likrat'o ("to meet him", H7122 + H9033) — infinitive with preposition and pronominal suffix "his/him," expressing the purpose of the king's going out.
• shuvo ("his returning", H7725 + H9043) — infinitive construct with possessive suffix, referring back to the subject who returned (grammatically ambiguous as to referent, since no explicit subject like "Abram" appears in this clause).
• mehakkot ("from defeating", H5221) — hiphil (causative) infinitive with prefixed preposition min ("from"), describing the military action just completed before the meeting.
• emeq ("valley of", H6010) — construct noun appearing twice, first naming the valley "Shaveh," then repeated in the closing identification clause "valley of the king."

What the text says

The verse is built as a single narrative sentence anchored by the main verb yetze ("he went out," H3318), with the king of Sodom as its explicit subject (melekh-Sedom, "king of Sodom," H4428+H5467). Everything else in the verse is subordinated to this action: the purpose clause likrato ("to meet him," H7122) states why he went out, and the temporal clause introduced by acharei ("after," H0310) — containing shuvo ("his returning," H7725) and mehakkot ("from defeating," H5221) — situates this departure after a military victory. Notably, the grammatical subject of shuvo and mehakkot is marked only by a pronominal suffix ("his returning," "his defeating"); the text does not name this person again within the verse, relying on the wider narrative context to identify the returning victor.

The direct object marker et (H0853, untranslated) appears twice, before "Kedorlaomer" and before "the kings," marking them as the objects of the defeating action, connected by the conjunction ve ("and," H9002). The final clause, introduced by the relative hu ("that," H1931) and repeating emeq ("valley of," H6010) in construct form, functions as an explanatory gloss identifying "the Valley of Shaveh" with "the King's Valley" — a naming clause rather than part of the main narrative action.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders melekh-Sedom as "βασιλεὺς Σοδόμων" (king of the Sodomites, plural form), while the Hebrew melekh Sedom uses the singular place name "Sodom." The Vulgate follows this plural pattern with "rex Sodomorum." The Hebrew emeq ("valley," H6010) is rendered by the LXX as "κοιλάδα" and "πεδίον" (using two different Greek terms for the same Hebrew word in its two occurrences), while the Vulgate consistently uses "valle" and "vallis."