Genesis 24:43

Summary

The servant of Abraham describes the test he intends to set at the spring: he will be standing by the water source, and when a young woman comes out to draw water, he will ask her for a drink from her jar. The verse combines a scene-setting participle with two sequential perfect verbs that project future actions in narrative sequence.

Key words

• hiNeh ("here!", H2009) — presentative interjection that opens the speech, drawing attention to the situation about to be described.
• nitzav ("standing", H5324) — niphal participle, masculine singular; expresses a fixed, ongoing stance ("I am standing") rather than a completed act, describing the servant's posture at the spring.
• ha'alMah ("the young woman", H5959) — feminine singular noun with definite article, marked as the specific woman who will fulfill the coming condition.
• hayyoTzet ("who will come out", H3318) — qal participle feminine singular with article, functioning as a relative clause attached to ha'alMah, describing her action of coming out to draw water.
• hashKini ("give me to drink", H8248) — hiphil imperative feminine singular with pronominal suffix -ni ("me"), a direct causative command embedded inside the servant's projected quoted speech.

What the text says

The sentence opens with hiNeh plus the independent pronoun 'anoKhi ("I") and the participle nitzav ("standing"), a construction that in Hebrew narrative marks a scene frozen in the present moment of speech — the servant locates himself spatially "at the spring of water" ('al-'ein ha-mayim) before anything else happens. The narrative then shifts into two verbs marked as sequential perfect (vav + perfect): vehayah ("and it will be") and ve'amarti ("and I will say"). This verb form continues a chain of future/conditional events set up by the participle, a typical Biblical Hebrew way of expressing "if... then" sequences without a formal conditional particle. The woman is introduced with the article plus a participial relative clause, ha'alMah hayyoTzet lish'ov ("the young woman who comes out to draw"), so her identity is defined entirely by the action she performs, not by any other description. The quoted request itself uses the hiphil imperative hashKini ("cause me to drink," i.e., "give me to drink"), with the particle na' ("please") softening the command, followed by me'at-mayim mikKadekh ("a little of water from your jar"), both nouns in construct chains that tie the amount and source tightly to the noun that follows.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the singular ha'alMah ("the young woman") with a plural phrase, "αἱ θυγατέρες τῶν ἀνθρώπων" ("the daughters of men"), before narrowing to "ἡ παρθένος" ("the virgin"), a fuller expansion not present in the Hebrew wording. The Vulgate restructures the reported speech: where the Hebrew has ve'amarti eleha ("and I will say to her"), the Vulgate uses "audierit a me" ("she shall have heard from me"), shifting the verb from the servant's act of speaking to the woman's act of hearing.