Genesis 15:4

Summary

The verse reports that "the word of Yehovah" came to Abram, declaring that the person previously mentioned (referred to as "this one") will not be his heir. Instead, the heir will be someone who comes forth from Abram's own body.

Key words

• devar ("word of", H1697G) — masculine singular construct form, linking "word" directly to the divine name that follows, producing the fixed expression "the word of Yehovah."
• lo' ("not", H3808) — negation particle placed immediately before the verb, negating the inheritance claim of "this one."
• yirashkha ("he will inherit you", H3423G) — qal imperfect third person masculine with a second-person pronominal suffix (-kha, "you"), meaning the verb itself already contains both subject ("he") and object ("you") without needing separate pronouns.
• ki-'im ("except/but rather", H3588B + H0518B) — a two-particle combination functioning as a strong adversative, introducing the contrasting alternative to what was just negated.
• me'ei-kha ("your inward parts", H4578 + H9021) — masculine plural construct noun with second-person suffix, literally "inward parts of you," used to indicate direct bodily descent.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with ve-hinneh ("and behold"), an interjection that introduces the divine message as immediate and vivid. The construct chain devar-Yehovah ("word of Yehovah") functions as the grammatical subject of an implied verb "came" (not explicitly present in this fragment but standard in the construction), followed by elav ("to him") and the infinitive le'mor ("saying"), which introduces direct speech.

The core statement uses a negated verb, lo' yirashkha zeh — literally "not he-will-inherit-you this one" — where zeh ("this one," H2088) stands as the subject, referring back to a previously named figure. The verb yirashkha (H3423G) already carries the suffix "-kha" ("you"), so the sentence needs no separate object pronoun. This is followed by the adversative ki im ("except/but"), which sets up a contrast: whoever "comes out" (yetze', H3318M, qal imperfect) "from your inward parts" (mimme'eikha) will be the heir. The clause ends by repeating the emphatic independent pronoun hu' ("he," H1931) before the final verb yirashekha ("he will inherit you"), reinforcing that the future heir — not "this one" — is the true subject of inheritance. The repetition of the same verb root (yrsh, "to inherit") at both the start and end of the verse creates a symmetrical negative-to-positive structure in Hebrew that is not always preserved in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders me'eikha ("your inward parts") as ἐκ σοῦ ("from you"), a more general phrase lacking the specific bodily reference found in the Hebrew me'im ("from the inward parts of"). The Vulgate uses de utero tuo ("from your womb"), which specifies a bodily origin but with different anatomical vocabulary than the Hebrew me'ei-kha ("your inward parts/bowels").