Genesis 20:8

Summary

Abimelech rises early in the morning, summons all his servants, and reports to them everything that has happened (literally "these words"). Upon hearing it, the men become extremely afraid.

Key words

• va-yashkem ("and he rose early", H7925) — hiphil narrative form, causative in stem though functioning intransitively here: Abimelech "causes himself" to rise early, marking urgency in the story sequence.
• va-yiqra ("and he summoned", H7121) — qal narrative verb, third masculine singular, continuing the chain of consecutive actions begun by va-yashkem.
• avadav ("his servants", H5650) — masculine plural construct noun with pronominal suffix "his," governed by kol ("all", H3605), producing the phrase "all his servants."
• va-yedabber ("and he spoke", H1696) — piel narrative verb, the intensive stem here conveying a full, deliberate act of speaking rather than a casual remark.
• ha-devarim ha-elleh ("these words/things", H1697 + H428) — plural noun with definite article followed by the demonstrative "these," referring back to the preceding divine communication in the narrative.

What the text says

The verse is built entirely on a chain of vav-consecutive verbs (va-yashkem, va-yiqra, va-yedabber, va-yire'u), each marked "and then," which gives the Hebrew a rapid, sequential rhythm: rising, summoning, speaking, and finally the servants' fear all follow one another without pause. The object of the speaking is introduced by the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) before kol ha-devarim ha-elleh ("all these words/things"), a construct chain that ties "all" to "the words" and then to the demonstrative "these" — pointing back to whatever content had just been narrated to Abimelech. The phrase be-oznei-hem ("in their ears", from ozen, H0241) is a dual-form construct noun with a plural suffix "their," an idiom meaning that the words were spoken directly and audibly to them, not simply reported in summary. The final clause uses me'od ("exceedingly", H3966) to intensify the qal verb yire'u ("they were afraid", H3372), stressing the degree of the men's reaction rather than merely stating that they were afraid.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va-yashkem ... ba-boqer as ὤρθρισεν ... τὸ πρωί ("he rose early... in the morning"), closely matching the Hebrew, while the Vulgate renders it as de nocte consurgens ("rising up at night"), shifting the temporal reference from "morning" to "night." The Hebrew devarim ("words/things", H1697) is rendered as ῥήματα ("words/sayings") in the LXX and as verba ("words") in the Vulgate, both preserving the sense of spoken content, whereas the BSB and SBLIBRE translations interpret ha-devarim ha-elleh more loosely as "all that had happened" or "todo lo que había pasado," shifting from "words" to "events."