Genesis 18:13

Summary

Yehovah addresses Abraham directly, quoting Sarah's internal question about laughing at the prospect of bearing a child in her old age. The verse frames Sarah's reaction as reported speech, embedding her doubt within a divine question posed to Abraham rather than to Sarah herself.

Key words

• tzachaKah ("did she laugh", H6711) — qal perfect, third person feminine singular: marks a completed past action, "she laughed" (already happened before this speech).
• leMor ("saying", H0559) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed preposition le- (H9005): introduces direct/reported speech, functioning as "saying" to open the quotation of Sarah's words.
• ha'Aph ("¿also", H0637) with interrogative ha- (H9008) — combination marking a rhetorical question with emphatic force, often rendered "shall I indeed...?"
• 'eLed ("will I bear a child", H3205) — qal imperfect, first person singular: expresses future/incomplete aspect, "I will bear" or "shall I bear."
• zaKanti ("I am old", H2204) — qal perfect, first person singular: completed state, "I have become old" / "I am old," paired with the pronoun 'aNi ("I", H0589) for emphasis.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative va-yYomer ("and he said", H0559) attributing speech to Yehovah (H3068G) directed 'el- ("to", H0413) Avraham (H0085). The question begins with Lammah zeh ("why this", H4100 + H2088), a construction combining the interrogative "why" with the demonstrative "this," which intensifies the question — literally "why this, that she laughed."

The infinitive leMor introduces Sarah's quoted words as indirect discourse embedded in Yehovah's speech to Abraham — the text does not show Yehovah addressing Sarah directly here, but rather reporting her laughter and her words to her husband. Sarah's quoted question itself uses two adverbs of emphasis, 'Aph ("also", H0637) and 'umNam ("really", H0552), stacked before the interrogative particle ha-, producing a doubled emphatic construction that intensifies the rhetorical doubt: something like "shall I indeed truly bear a child?"

The final clause pairs the independent pronoun 'aNi ("I", H0589) with the perfect verb zaKanti ("I am old", H2204). The use of the pronoun alongside the finite verb (which already encodes "I" as its subject) creates emphasis on the contrast between the two clauses — bearing a child versus being old.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tzachaKah ("did she laugh") with ἐγέλασεν ἐν ἑαυτῇ ("laughed within herself"), adding a reflexive phrase not present in the Hebrew leMor construction, which the Hebrew instead uses to introduce a quotation rather than describe an internal action. The Vulgate's dicens ("saying") follows the Hebrew leMor more closely in function. The doubled Hebrew emphatic ha'Aph 'umNam ("shall...also...really") is rendered in the LXX simply as Ἀρά γε ἀληθῶς ("so then truly"), and in the Vulgate as Num vere ("is it indeed true"), both compressing the double emphasis into a single interrogative marker.