Genesis 20:5

Summary

Genesis 20:5 records Abimelech's defense speech to God, in which he recounts that both Abraham and Sarah told him they were siblings, and he claims to have acted in good faith. The verse uses a rhetorical question followed by a declarative statement about his innocence.

Key words

• hu' ("he", H1931) — personal pronoun used three times (positions 3, 9, 11/13) to emphasize the subjects "he" and "she" in reported speech, creating a parallel structure between Abraham's statement and Sarah's statement.
• 'amar ("did he say", H0559) — qal perfect verb marking completed past speech, introducing the interrogative clause about what Abraham had said.
• tom ("[the] integrity of", H8537) — masculine singular construct noun, forming a construct chain with levav ("heart", H3824) plus the 1st person suffix, literally "integrity of my heart."
• niqyon ("[the] innocence of", H5356A) — masculine singular construct noun paired with kappay ("hands", H3709G, feminine dual), forming "innocence of my hands," parallel to the previous construct phrase.
• 'asiti ("I have done", H6213A) — qal perfect, 1st person, closing the verse with a first-person affirmation of the completed action ("this").

What the text says

The verse opens with the interrogative particle ha (H9008) attached to the negation lo' (H3808), forming a rhetorical question construction ("did he not...?"). This is followed by the emphatic pronoun hu' ("he", H1931) before the verb 'amar ("did he say", H0559), which places grammatical stress on the subject — Abraham — rather than simply stating the action. The reported speech "achoti hi" ("[is] sister she") uses a construct noun (achot, H0269) with a 1st person suffix followed by the pronoun hi' ("she", H1931), a common Hebrew pattern for direct quotation without a separate verb "to be."

The second half of the verse mirrors this structure: hi' gam hi' ("she also she") emphatically repeats the pronoun hi' (H1931) twice, stressing that it was Sarah herself who made the parallel claim about Abraham being her brother. The two construct chains tom-levavi ("integrity of my heart") and niqyon-kappay ("innocence of my hands") are grammatically parallel — both are masculine singular construct nouns governing a following noun with a 1st person possessive suffix, though kappay is dual, referring to both hands. This pairing of "heart" and "hands" ties an internal disposition to physical action, both governed by the concluding verb 'asiti ("I have done", H6213A) and the demonstrative zot ("this", H2063).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew construct chain bə-tom-levavi u-vniqyon kappay ("in integrity of my heart and in innocence of my hands") with a shortened phrase, ἐν καθαρᾷ καρδίᾳ ("in a clean heart"), omitting an explicit equivalent for "hands" (kappay, H3709G) that appears in the Hebrew and in the Vulgate's munditia manuum mearum ("cleanness of my hands"). The Vulgate's in simplicitate cordis mei ("in simplicity of my heart") and munditia manuum mearum preserve both construct phrases found in the Hebrew, matching the Hebrew's two-part structure more closely than the LXX text given here.