Genesis 24:21

Summary

The verse describes the man observing the woman in silence, waiting to determine whether Yehovah had granted success to his journey. The Hebrew frames his mental state through two participles and expresses his internal question using a formal interrogative construction meaning "whether... or not."

Key words

• mishta'eh ("gazing/marveling", H7583) — hithpael participle, masculine singular; the reflexive/intensive stem suggests the man is caught up in the act of observing her, an ongoing state rather than a single glance.
• machrish ("being silent", H2790B) — hiphil participle, masculine singular; paired with the previous participle, both describe simultaneous, continuing actions (he was gazing, he was being silent) rather than completed events.
• lada'at ("to know", H3045) — qal infinitive with prefixed preposition la- ("to" H9005); expresses purpose — the silence and gazing exist in order to know something.
• ha-hitzliach ("had he made successful", H6743B) — hiphil perfect with interrogative ha- (H9008) prefixed; the perfect aspect marks the action as completed from the man's point of view (he wants to know if success has already happened), and the ha- particle turns the clause into a formal question embedded within the infinitive purpose clause.
• im-lo ("or not", H0518A + H3808) — the conditional particle im combined with the negation lo' forms the second half of the disjunctive question, "or not," creating the full structure "whether X or not."

What the text says

The clause opens with ve-ha-'ish ("and the man", H9002+H9009+H0376G) as subject, followed by two masculine singular participles — mishta'eh and machrish — both governed by the same subject and connected without an explicit conjunction between them in the word list, presenting his gazing and his silence as parallel, simultaneous states. The participle form (rather than a finite verb) portrays these as ongoing conditions describing the man's demeanor at that moment, not as sequential completed acts.

The purpose of this behavior is given by the infinitive clause introduced by la-da'at ("to know"): what follows is the content of that knowledge, structured as a formal indirect question. The interrogative particle ha- attached to hitzliach ("had he made successful") signals a yes/no question embedded inside the infinitive clause, and the perfect aspect of hitzliach indicates the man is asking about a state of affairs already accomplished (or not) by the time he observes her — "has Yehovah already made his journey succeed." The disjunctive continuation im-lo ("or not") completes this as a full alternative question: success attained, or not.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two participial states with katemanthanen ("observed closely") and paresiōpa ("kept silent"), both finite imperfect verbs rather than participles, converting the Hebrew's descriptive participial construction into ordinary narrative past-tense clauses. The Vulgate similarly uses contemplabatur (imperfect) plus the adjective tacitus ("silent"), collapsing the two Hebrew participles into a verb-plus-adjective phrase. Both LXX and Vulgate render the embedded question with ē...ē / utrum...an ("whether...or"), matching the Hebrew's ha-...im lo disjunctive structure in function, though the Hebrew marks the first term of the question with the interrogative ha- prefix on the verb itself, a device with no direct morphological equivalent in Greek or Latin.