Genesis 18:15

וַתְּכַחֵשׁ שָׂרָה׀ לֵאמֹר לֹא צָחַקְתִּי כִּי׀ יָרֵאָה וַיֹּאמֶר׀ לֹא כִּי צָחָֽקְתְּ׃

✦ Hebrew interlinear

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✦ The same verse in five languages

Hebrew

וַתְּכַחֵ֨שׁ שָׂרָ֧ה׀ לֵאמֹ֛ר לֹ֥א צָחַ֖קְתִּי כִּ֣י׀ יָרֵ֑אָה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר׀ לֹ֖א כִּ֥י צָחָֽקְתְּ׃

Greek (Septuagint)

ἠρνήσατο δὲ Σάρρα λέρυσα Οὐκ ἐγέλασα· ἐφοβήθη γἀρ. γάρ. καὶ εἶπεν Οὐχί, ἀλλὰ ἐγέλασας.

Greek text from Swete's edition, CC BY-SA 4.0

Latin (Vulgate)

Negavit Sara, dicens: Non risi, timore perterrita. Dominus autem: Non est, inquit, ita: sed risisti.

Spanish

Llena de miedo, Sara mintió y dijo: “No me estaba riendo”. Pero él le replicó: “No es cierto, sí te reíste”.

Classic Spanish (Reina-Valera 1909)

Entonces Sara negó diciendo: No me reí; porque tuvo miedo. Y él dijo: No es así, sino que te has reído.

English

But Sarah was afraid, so she denied it and said, “ I did not laugh.” “ No,” replied the LORD, “ but you did laugh.” Abraham Intercedes for Sodom

✦ What the text says

Summary

Sarah denies having laughed, claiming she did not laugh, out of fear. The speaker (unnamed in this verse but understood from context) contradicts her denial, insisting that she did indeed laugh.

Key words

va-tekhachesh ("she denied", H3584) — piel stem, an intensive form of the root for lying/deceiving; combined with the narrative vav, it marks the next event in sequence: Sarah's act of denial.
le'mor ("saying", H0559) — infinitive construct introducing direct speech; it frames what follows as Sarah's exact words.
tzachakti ("I laughed", H6711) — qal perfect, first person; denotes a completed action, here negated by lo ("not", H3808) to produce her claim "I did not laugh."
ki yare'ah ("for she was afraid", H3372G) — qal perfect with the particle ki (H3588A) functioning causally ("for/because"); this clause supplies the narrator's explanation for why Sarah lied.
lo ki tzachaket ("no, indeed you laughed", H3808 + H3588A + H6711) — here ki functions adversatively ("but/indeed") rather than causally, producing the idiomatic negation-correction pattern "not [true], rather...".

What the text says

The verse is built as two paired speech units joined by narrative vav-forms: first va-tekhachesh...le'mor introduces Sarah's denial, and then va-yomer introduces the reply. Sarah's statement is a simple qal perfect negated by lo, "I did not laugh" — a completed-action claim about the past. The narrator then adds a causal clause with ki, "for she was afraid," explaining her motive without her voicing it herself.

The reply structure "lo, ki tzachaket" reuses both lo and ki, but here ki is not causal — it functions to introduce a corrective statement, producing sense like "no, rather you laughed." The Hebrew text does not name the speaker of this reply within the verse itself; the form va-yomer is simply third-person masculine singular, "and he said," leaving the referent to be supplied from surrounding context.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew clause va-yomer ("and he said") does not specify a subject within this verse. The Vulgate makes this explicit by inserting "Dominus autem" ("but the Lord"), naming the speaker directly, while the Hebrew and the LXX (kai eipen, "and he said") leave the subject unstated in the verse itself. The LXX text as given also contains a repeated gar ("for... for"), where the Hebrew has a single ki ("for") corresponding to yare'ah ("she was afraid").

This explanation describes the text using linguistic data; it adds no doctrine or confessional interpretation.