Genesis 36:3

Summary

This fragment identifies one of Esau's wives, Basemath, by specifying her paternal and fraternal relationships: she is the daughter of Ishmael and the sister of Nebaioth. The verse continues a list (marked by the initial "and") of wives associated with Esau in the preceding context.

Key words

• 'et ("", H0853) — the direct object marker, untranslated in English/Spanish, signals that Basemath is the grammatical object of a verb from the prior clause (likely "took" or "married," not shown in this fragment).
• bat- ("[the] daughter of", H1323G) — feminine singular noun in construct state, meaning it must be followed by another noun to complete its meaning ("daughter of X"); here it links Basemath to Ishmael.
• 'achot ("[the] sister of", H0269) — feminine singular noun in construct state, parallel in function to bat-, linking Basemath to Nebaioth as siblings.
• Yishma'El ("Ishmael", H3458G) — proper name, functions as the noun completing the construct chain begun by bat-.
• Nevayot ("Nebaioth", H5032) — proper name, completes the construct chain begun by 'achot.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure relies on two construct chains (semikhut) placed in apposition to the name Basemat ("Basemath", H1315I). A construct chain in Hebrew joins two nouns where the first (here bat- and 'achot) is grammatically dependent on the second (Yishma'El and Nevayot), producing the sense "daughter of Ishmael" and "sister of Nebaioth." Both construct phrases modify Basemath, giving her two distinct genealogical identifications within a single compact clause.

The direct object marker 'et at the start indicates that this whole phrase — name plus its two appositional descriptions — functions as one grammatical object, connected by the conjunction ve- ("and", H9002) to a prior list, since the verse begins mid-sentence syntactically.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Ἰσμαήλ, Ναβαιώθ) and the Vulgate (Ismaël, Nabaioth) preserve the same two proper names and the same relational structure (daughter/sister) as the Hebrew, showing no substantive divergence in content, only the expected transliteration variants of the personal names across Greek and Latin.