Genesis 34:24

Summary

The verse reports the collective compliance of the men of Shechem's city: they listened to Hamor and his son Shechem, and as a result every male among "those who went out of the gate of his city" underwent circumcision. The clause structure repeats the phrase "all who go out of the gate of his city" twice, framing the subject at both the beginning and the resolution of the action.

Key words

• va-yish.me'u ("and they listened", H8085) — qal narrative verb, 3rd masculine plural, establishing the main sequential action: collective attention/obedience to the proposal.
• bnо ("his son", H1121A + H9023) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, identifying Shechem specifically as son of Hamor, tying the two named individuals together as the addressees of the listening.
• yotze'ei ("those who go out of", H3318G) — qal participle, masculine plural construct, used twice (lines 11 and 20) to describe the population by their habitual action of exiting through the gate, functioning as a designation for "the men of the city" rather than a literal act of exiting at that moment.
• va-yimmolu ("and they were circumcised", H4135A) — niphal narrative verb, 3rd masculine plural; the niphal stem marks the action as passive or reflexive, i.e., the men underwent circumcision rather than performing it on themselves as an active transitive act stated outright.
• kol-zachar ("every male", H3605 + H2145) — construct chain, singular noun + adjective, specifying the class of persons affected: not "all people" but specifically "every male."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in two parallel movements, each closing with the identical phrase kol-yotze'ei sha'ar iro ("all who go out of the gate of his city"). The first occurrence (words 10–14) identifies the subject of the verb yishme'u ("they listened") — it is not merely "the people" but specifically those characterized as "goers-out of the gate of his city," a participial construction that functions here as a standing designation for the male citizenry with public standing, rather than describing them literally departing at that moment. The verb yishme'u takes the two named individuals, Chamor ("Hamor", H2544) and Shechem ("Shechem", H7927H), as its object via the preposition 'el ("to", H0413), repeated for each name — grammatically marking two separate but linked addressees of the group's attention.

The second clause pivots to va-yimmolu ("and they were circumcised"), a niphal verb whose passive/reflexive form leaves the grammatical subject, kol-zachar ("every male"), as the one undergoing the action rather than the explicit agent performing it. The repetition of kol-yotze'ei sha'ar iro at the end re-identifies the same group as the ones affected, forming an envelope structure around the verse: the same body that agreed is the same body that is circumcised.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (Assensique sunt omnes, circumcisis cunctis maribus) compresses the repeated Hebrew phrase "all who go out of the gate of his city" into a simple "omnes" ("all"), omitting the participial gate-imagery present twice in the Hebrew. The LXX preserves the gate phrase once (τὴν πύλην τῆς πόλεως αὐτῶν) but likewise does not repeat it at the close, instead closing with πᾶς ἄρσην ("every male"), structurally shortening the Hebrew's double framing.