Genesis 19:34

Summary

The verse reports the speech of the older daughter of Lot to her younger sister, the day after the first encounter with their father. She states that she herself lay with their father the previous night, proposes to give him wine again, and directs her sister to go in and lie with him, stating the purpose as preserving offspring from their father.

Key words

• bekhirah ("firstborn", H1067) — feminine singular noun with definite article, designating the older sister as the speaker; the term marks birth order, not merely age.
• shakhavti ("I lay with", H7901I) — qal perfect, 1st person: a completed action reported by the speaker about herself, referring to the previous night ('emesh, H0570).
• nashqennu ("let us make drink him", H8248H) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, 1st plural, with 3rd masculine singular suffix "him": the causative stem indicates causing the father to drink, i.e., producing intoxication, not merely serving a drink.
• vo'i ("go", H0935G) and shikhvi ("lie", H7901I) — both qal imperatives, feminine singular: direct commands addressed to the younger sister, paralleling the same verb shakhav used earlier for the older sister's own action.
• nechayyeh ("we may preserve alive", H2421) — piel (intensive) imperfect with vav, 1st plural: expresses purpose/result ("so that we may keep alive"), governing the phrase zera' ("offspring/seed", H2233H) me'avinu ("from our father", H0001G + H9025).

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula va-yehi mi-mmochorat ("and it was from the next day"), a standard Hebrew construction marking a new narrative unit tied temporally to the prior scene. The main clause, va-tomer ha-bekhirah 'el ha-tze'irah ("and the firstborn said to the young one"), introduces direct speech using the qal narrative form tomer, typical of Biblical Hebrew storytelling.

The sister's speech is built in two parts joined by gam ("also," H1571): first a report of her own past action (shakhavti 'emesh 'et 'avi, "I lay with my father last night," using the direct object marker 'et, H0853, which is grammatically necessary but untranslatable), and then a proposal for repeating the wine-based plan (nashqennu yayin gam ha-laylah, "let us make him drink wine also tonight"). The hiphil stem of nashqennu is significant grammatically: it is a causative form, meaning the sisters are not simply offering the father a drink but acting to bring about his intoxicated state.

The final clause chains three verb forms — the imperatives vo'i and shikhvi directed at the younger sister, followed by the piel imperfect nechayyeh, which expresses the stated purpose of the entire sequence: "so that we may preserve alive... offspring from our father." The construct phrase me-'avinu zera' ("seed from our father") places the source ('avinu, "our father," with 1st plural suffix) before the goal (zera', "seed/offspring").

Differences between versions

The LXX renders bekhirah ("firstborn") as ἡ πρεσβυτέρα ("the older/elder") and tze'irah as ἡ νεωτέρα ("the younger"), shifting from a birth-order term to a comparative age term; the Vulgate follows this with major and minorem. Where the Hebrew has the interjection hen ("here!", H2005) introducing the sister's statement, the LXX has ἰδοῦ ("behold") and the Vulgate ecce, both functioning similarly as attention-drawing particles. The LXX renders the causative nashqennu with the subjunctive ποτίσωμεν ("let us give to drink"), and the Vulgate's demus ei bibere ("let us give him to drink") likewise conveys the causative sense without a distinct verb stem, since Latin and Greek do not have the same binyan system as Hebrew.