Genesis 18:19

Summary

The verse presents Yehovah's interior reasoning about Abraham: because Yehovah has known him, Abraham will instruct his descendants to keep the divine way through righteousness and justice, so that Yehovah's promises to Abraham may be fulfilled. The sentence is built as a chain of purpose clauses moving from Yehovah's knowledge of Abraham to the eventual fulfillment of what was spoken to him.

Key words

• yeda'tiv ("I have known him", H3045) — qal perfect, first person, with a third-person masculine singular object suffix (-iv, "him") attached directly to the verb; states a completed state of knowing that grounds the rest of the sentence.
• lema'an ("so that", H4616) — appears twice in the verse (lines 4 and 25), each time introducing a purpose clause; the double use creates a layered structure: one purpose clause governs Abraham's action, the second governs Yehovah's resulting action.
• yetzavveh ("he may command", H6680) — piel jussive, expressing volitional or intended action ("let him command / that he command"), not a simple future.
• shamru ("they will keep", H8104) — qal, in the sequential perfect form, continuing the chain of purpose begun by yetzavveh; the descendants' keeping of the way is presented as consequence of the command.
• havi ("to bring", H0935) — hiphil infinitive construct, causative sense ("to cause to come/bring about"), tied to the second lema'an, expressing Yehovah's own resulting action.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is structured around ki ("for", H3588A) introducing the reason clause, followed by yeda'tiv with its attached object suffix — the verb and its object are fused into one word, a feature not preserved in translations that render it as two separate words ("I have known him"). From this stated knowledge flows the first lema'an clause: the piel jussive yetzavveh expresses that Abraham "may command" or "should command" his banav ("his children", H1121A) and beito ("his household", H1004M), each construct-suffix form marking possession directly on the noun. The sequential perfect shamru ("they will keep") extends this into a further consequence — the descendants keeping derekh Yehovah ("the way of Yehovah", H1870G/H3068G), a construct phrase, by la'asot tzedaqah u-mishpat ("doing righteousness and justice", infinitive construct with preposition la). The second lema'an clause then shifts the purpose to Yehovah's own action, using the hiphil infinitive havi ("to bring") to link Abraham's household's conduct to Yehovah's fulfillment of what was dibber ("he has spoken", piel perfect, H1696I) concerning Abraham.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew presents two purpose clauses (lema'an... lema'an), but the LXX renders the first as a content clause with ὅτι ("that"), and the Vulgate similarly uses "quod" ("that"), both shifting from a stated purpose to a reported fact about what Abraham will do. The LXX's ᾔδειν ("I knew") lacks the attached pronominal object visible in the Hebrew yeda'tiv ("I have known him"), rendering the knowledge more generally. The BSB gloss "I have chosen him" for yeda'ti diverges from the literal sense "known," reflecting an interpretive rendering rather than a direct translation of H3045.