Genesis 21:1

Summary

The verse states that Yehovah acted toward Sarah in two parallel ways: he "visited" her and he "did" for her, each action explicitly matched to something previously spoken. The sentence uses two verbs of divine action, each followed by a comparative clause tying the action to a prior statement.

Key words

• pa.Kad ("he visited", H6485I) — qal perfect, 3rd person masculine singular; a completed action denoting Yehovah's direct intervention concerning Sarah.
• 'a.Mar ("he had said", H0559) — qal perfect; refers back to an earlier spoken statement, marked as prior to the main narrative action by the comparative construction.
• Ya.'as ("he did", H6213A) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive), 3rd person masculine singular; continues the story sequence, presenting this action as following from the first.
• di.Ber ("he had spoken", H1696I) — piel perfect; an intensive verbal stem, distinct from the simple 'a.Mar used earlier, referring to a second act of prior speech.
• 'a.Sher ("as/that", H0834D) — relative particle, used twice (with prefixed ka-, "just as") to construct the comparison between the completed divine action and the prior verbal statement.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two parallel halves, each following the same pattern: subject (Yehovah, H3068G) + verb of action + comparative clause introduced by ka'asher ("just as") + verb of prior speech. In the first half, pa.Kad ("he visited") is paired with 'a.Mar ("he had said"); in the second half, Ya.'as ("he did") is paired with di.Ber ("he had spoken"). Both verbs of action are perfect/narrative forms indicating completed action, while both verbs of speech are likewise perfect, marking them as occurring prior to or foundational to the action described.

A grammatical nuance is the shift between the two speech-verbs: 'a.Mar (qal, simple stem) in the first clause and di.Ber (piel, intensive stem) in the second. This distinction in verbal stem is present in the Hebrew but does not necessarily surface in translation, since both are typically rendered "said" or "spoken" in English versions. The object marker 'et (H0853) before "Sarah" in the first clause has no independent lexical meaning; it simply marks Sarah as the direct object of pa.Kad, whereas in the second clause "Sarah" is introduced with the preposition le- ("to", H9005), showing a different syntactic relationship to the verb Ya.'as.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders pa.Kad with epeskepsato ("visited/looked upon"), matching the Hebrew sense of divine attention. The Vulgate uses visitavit ("visited") for the same verb, and translates ka'asher... dibber not literally as "as he had spoken" but as implevit quæ locutus est ("he fulfilled what he had spoken"), introducing the verb "fulfilled" (implevit), which is not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew text, where the construction is simply a comparative clause with Ya.'as ("he did").