Genesis 25:1

Summary

Genesis 25:1 reports that Abraham took another woman as wife, whose name was Keturah. The Hebrew uses a doubled-verb construction to express that this action was a repetition of an earlier action (marrying).

Key words

• yosef ("he repeated/added", H3254) — hiphil (causative) form of the root meaning "to add." Paired with a following verb, it expresses that the action was done "again" or "additionally."
• yiqqach ("he took", H3947) — qal narrative form of laqach, the standard verb for taking a wife in marriage narratives.
• ishah ("a wife", H0802) — feminine singular noun, indefinite (no article), marking her as "a wife" rather than "the wife."
• shem ("name", H8034) — construct form, meaning "name of," here bound to the following suffix "her" (H9024) to produce "her name."
• Keturah ("Keturah", H6989) — proper noun, introduced by the construct chain shemah Keturah, "her name [was] Keturah."

What the text says

The sentence opens with two narrative verbs in sequence, both prefixed with the narrative va ("and… and then…"): vayosef ("and he repeated/added") followed by vayiqqach ("and he took"). This is a verbal hendiadys, a common Hebrew construction where the first verb (here in the hiphil, causative form of "to add") modifies the second verb adverbially. The combination communicates that Abraham "took again" or "took in addition" — i.e., the taking of a wife was a repeated or additional instance of an action already performed earlier in the narrative (his prior marriage to Sarah). The Hebrew does not use a separate adjective like "another" (as in "another wife"); the sense of repetition/addition is carried entirely by the doubled-verb structure with yosef.

The clause naming the wife follows a common formula in Genesis for introducing a new figure: ishah ("a wife") stands in apposition, followed by u-shemah Keturah ("and her name [was] Keturah"), using the construct noun shem plus the pronominal suffix "her." This naming formula is grammatically identical to other name-introductions in Genesis.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the hendiadys with a participle plus finite verb — Προσθέμενος... ἔλαβεν ("having added, he took") — preserving the two-verb structure of the Hebrew. The Vulgate collapses this into a single verb with an adjective, aliam duxit uxorem ("he took another wife"), expressing the same idea of repetition/addition through the word aliam ("another") rather than through a doubled verb. The Hebrew itself contains no word equivalent to "another"; that nuance is inferred from the yosef + yiqqach construction rather than stated as a separate lexical item.