Genesis 21:18

Summary

This verse contains a series of imperative commands addressed to a woman (grammatically marked feminine throughout), instructing her to lift up a boy and take hold of his hand, followed by a divine declaration of future action: making the boy into a great nation.

Key words

• Ku.mi ("arise", H6965B) — qal imperative, feminine singular; a command directed specifically at a woman, the first in a chain of four verbal actions.
• ha.cha.Zi.ki ("take hold", H2388H) — hiphil (causative) imperative, feminine singular; the causative stem intensifies the action beyond simple touching, indicating a firm grasp being caused/effected.
• ya.De ("hand", H3027G) + kh ("your", H9022) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, literally "hand-of-you", specifying whose hand performs the holding.
• ki ("for/that", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the reason or basis for the preceding commands.
• 'a.si.Me ("I will make", H7760A) — qal imperfect, first person singular; imperfect aspect conveys an action not yet completed, pointing to future realization.

What the text says

The verse opens with two feminine singular imperatives in sequence — Ku.mi ("arise") and se.'I ("lift up") — both qal stem, addressed to the same female subject without an explicit pronoun, as Biblical Hebrew imperatives encode person and gender directly in the verb form. The object of the second imperative is Na.'ar ("lad", H5288), marked with the untranslated direct object particle 'et- (H0853) and the definite article ha. (H9009), specifying a particular, known boy rather than a boy in general.

A third imperative follows, ha.cha.Zi.ki ("take hold"), in the hiphil stem — a causative form that in Hebrew often intensifies or gives active force to an action compared to the simpler qal stem. Its object is ya.De ("hand") in construct form with the suffix -kh ("your," feminine), producing "your hand," and the phrase closes with bo ("in him/on him," H9033), specifying the hand's contact point.

The particle ki (H3588A) shifts the sentence from command to explanation, introducing the reason for the preceding actions. The concluding clause uses le- ("into," H9005) with Goy Gadol ("a nation," "great") to describe the destination of the action, and 'a.si.Me ("I will make"), a qal imperfect first-person verb, expresses this as an incomplete, future-oriented action performed by the speaker, with the suffix -nu ("him," H9033) marking the boy as the one being made into this nation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Na.'ar ("lad", H5288) as παιδίον ("young child"), a diminutive term, where the Hebrew word does not carry an explicit diminutive sense. The Vulgate's tene manum illius ("hold his hand") uses a genitive construction differing structurally from the Hebrew's construct chain yadekh bo ("your hand on/in him"), though the meaning conveyed is equivalent.