Genesis 19:33

Summary

Genesis 19:33 narrates that on that particular night, the daughters made their father drink wine, the firstborn daughter came and lay with him, and he did not perceive her lying down or her rising up. The verse is built as a chain of narrative actions connected by the vav-consecutive.

Key words

• tashqeina ("they made drink", H8248) — hiphil causative form, feminine plural: the daughters cause the father to drink, not merely give him wine.
• bekhirah ("firstborn", H1067) — feminine singular noun with definite article ha (H9009), identifying which daughter acts first.
• yada' ("he knew/perceived", H3045) — qal perfect, negated by lo' (H3808), expressing a completed state of non-awareness.
• shikhvah ("her lying down", H7901) — qal infinitive with pronominal suffix -h ("her"), paired with qumah ("her rising", H6965) in the same grammatical construction.
• 'et-'avihen / 'et-'aviha ("their father" / "her father", H0001) — construct noun 'avi ("father of") with pronominal suffixes, repeated twice in the verse to mark the relationship precisely.

What the text says

The verse is structured as a sequence of four narrative clauses, each introduced by the vav-consecutive (va-, H9001), which in Biblical Hebrew narrative prose chains events chronologically: "and they made drink... and she came... and she lay... and he did not know." This syntactic pattern presents the actions as a continuous sequence rather than as isolated or simultaneous events.

The causative hiphil of tashqeina ("they made drink", H8248) is grammatically distinct from a simple qal "to drink" — it specifies that the daughters were the agents producing the father's state, not that he drank on his own initiative in the narrative's grammar. The final clause uses two parallel qal infinitives, shikhvah ("her lying down", H7901) and qumah ("her rising", H6965), each carrying the same third-person feminine singular suffix -h ("her"). This infinitive pairing, governed by the preposition be- ("when", H9003) in both cases, frames the father's lack of perception (yada', H3045, negated by lo', H3808) as encompassing the entire span of the act, from beginning to end.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders bekhirah ("firstborn", H1067) as ἡ πρεσβυτέρα ("the older/elder"), a comparative rather than a strict superlative "firstborn," though both convey birth-order priority. The Vulgate uses major ("the greater/elder"), similarly comparative. The Hebrew infinitive construction be-shikhvah... u-be-qumah ("in her lying down... and in her rising", H7901/H6965) is rendered in the LXX with the aorist infinitive ἐν τῷ κοιμηθῆναι... καὶ ἀναστῆναι, and in the Vulgate with temporal clauses quando accubuit... quando surrexit ("when she lay down... when she rose"), both preserving the paired temporal structure of the Hebrew.