Genesis 14:20
וּבָרוּךְ אֵל עֶלְיוֹן אֲשֶׁר־מִגֵּן צָרֶיךָ בְּיָדֶךָ וַיִּתֶּן־לוֹ מַעֲשֵׂר מִכֹּֽל׃
✦ Hebrew interlinear
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✦ The same verse in five languages
וּבָרוּךְ֙ אֵ֣ל עֶלְי֔וֹן אֲשֶׁר־מִגֵּ֥ן צָרֶ֖יךָ בְּיָדֶ֑ךָ וַיִּתֶּן־ל֥וֹ מַעֲשֵׂ֖ר מִכֹּֽל׃
καὶ εὐλογητὸς ὁ θεὸς ὁ ὕψιστος, ὃς παρέδωκεν τοὺς ἐχθρούς σου ὑποχειρίους σοι. καὶ ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ δεκάτην ἀπὸ πάντων.
Greek text from Swete's edition, CC BY-SA 4.0
Latin (Vulgate)
et benedictus Deus excelsus, quo protegente, hostes in manibus tuis sunt. Et dedit ei decimas ex omnibus.
¡Y bendito sea el Dios Altísimo, que entregó a tus enemigos en tus manos!” Entonces Abram le dio a Melquisedec la décima parte de todo lo que había recuperado.
Classic Spanish (Reina-Valera 1909)
Y bendito sea el Dios alto, que entregó tus enemigos en tu mano. Y dióle Abram los diezmos de todo.
and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Then Abram gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything.
✦ What the text says
Summary
Genesis 14:20 records a blessing pronounced over God Most High for having delivered an unnamed subject's enemies into the hand of another unnamed party ("your hand"). The verse then narrates, with a new verb, that "he gave him a tenth of everything" — the identities of giver and receiver are not restated by name in the Hebrew.
Key words
- baruch ("[be] blessed", H1288) — qal passive participle, masculine singular; describes a state rather than a completed action, functioning as a predicate of praise ("blessed [is]...").
- El ("God", H0410J) and Elyon ("Most High", H5945H) — a noun-adjective pair naming the deity who receives the blessing; Elyon modifies El as an epithet.
- migen ("he has delivered", H4042) — piel perfect, third person masculine singular; the piel stem intensifies the action, and the perfect aspect marks it as a completed event prior to the speech.
- tzareikha ("your opponents", H6862C) — masculine plural noun in construct with the second-person suffix -kha ("your"), literally "opponents-of-you."
- yiten ("he gave", H5414G) — qal, introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which continues the story sequence ("and then he gave"); the subject is marked only by verb morphology (third masculine singular), not by an explicit noun.
What the text says
The verse opens with a nominal blessing clause: barukh El Elyon — a passive participle followed by the divine title, structurally parallel to a similar blessing formula elsewhere in the chapter. The relative clause asher migen tzareikha be-yadekha ("who has delivered your opponents into your hand") supplies the reason for the blessing, using the piel perfect migen to stress a decisive, completed deliverance, and the construct chain tzareikha / be-yadekha ("opponents of you" / "in hand of you") to tie the enemies directly to the addressee via the second-person suffix repeated twice.
The second half of the verse shifts to narrative sequence with va-yiten ("and he gave"), followed by lo ("to him") — a pronominal suffix, not a proper name. The object is ma'aser mi-kol ("a tenth from everything/all"). Because Hebrew here relies entirely on third-person verb and suffix morphology, the text itself does not name either the giver or the receiver of the tithe; the identification of these parties depends on the surrounding narrative context rather than on the grammar of this verse alone.
Differences between versions
The Hebrew, LXX (edōken autō, "he gave to him"), and Vulgate (dedit ei, "he gave to him") all preserve the same unspecified third-person structure without naming the subject or recipient. The English (BSB) and Spanish (SBLIBRE) translations supply the proper names "Abram" and "Melchizedek" explicitly, which are not present as lexical items in this verse's Hebrew, Greek, or Latin text.
This explanation describes the text using linguistic data; it adds no doctrine or confessional interpretation.