Genesis 24:54

Summary

The verse narrates a sequence of actions: the servant and the men accompanying him eat, drink, and spend the night; the next morning they get up, and the servant requests to be sent back to his master. The Hebrew presents this through a chain of consecutive narrative verbs typical of biblical storytelling.

Key words

• yo'khelu ("they ate", H0398) — qal narrative form marking a sequential action ("and then they ate"), part of the verb chain opening the verse.
• yalinu ("they stayed the night", H3885A) — qal narrative form; the same va- prefix pattern links this action directly to the eating and drinking that precede it.
• yaqumu ("they arose", H6965B) — plural narrative verb; the subject is grammatically plural (the servant and the men), not singular.
• shallechuni ("send me", H7971G) — piel imperative, second person plural, with a first-person object suffix (-ni, "me"); the piel stem intensifies the sense of "sending away/dismissing," and the plural imperative addresses the household collectively.
• 'adoni ("my master", H0113) — construct noun with first-person suffix, literally "master of me," identifying Abraham as the one to whom the servant wishes to return.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of vav-consecutive verbs (va-yo'khelu, va-yishtu, va-yalinu, va-yaqumu, va-yomer), each introduced by the narrative va (H9001), which strings the actions into a single continuous sequence: eating, drinking, spending the night, rising, and speaking. The subject of this chain is specified only once, through the pronoun hu' ("he", H1931) joined by ve- ("and") to ha-'anashim ("the men", H0582) with the relative clause 'asher-'immo ("who [were] with him") — meaning the singular servant and the plural group of men act together throughout verbs 2–15, all inflected in the plural form.

The final verb, va-yomer ("and he said", H0559), switches back to a singular subject, though the text does not restate who speaks — grammatically it is the last explicit singular referent, hu'. This speaker issues the imperative shallechuni, addressed to a plural "you" (the household), asking to be sent la-'adoni ("to my master", H0113), using the construct form that ties "master" directly to the speaker's own identity as a servant under authority.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the rising as a singular participle, anastas ("having risen"), where the Hebrew yaqumu is plural ("they arose"), narrowing the action to one person rather than the group. The LXX also adds hina apelthō pros ton kyrion mou ("that I may go to my lord"), an explanatory clause not present in the Hebrew, which states only shallechuni la'doni ("send me to my master") without a purpose clause. The Vulgate names the speaker explicitly as puer ("the servant/boy"), where the Hebrew leaves the subject of va-yomer unstated beyond the earlier pronoun hu'.