Genesis 38:13

Summary

The verse reports that Tamar received news, phrased as direct speech, informing her that her father-in-law was going up to Timnah to shear his sheep. The sentence introduces the report that will lead her to act in the following verses.

Key words

• yugad ("it was told", H5046) — hophal (causative-passive) verb form: someone caused this news to be told; no explicit agent is named, only the impersonal passive construction.
• chamikh ("your father-in-law", H2524 + H9022) — masculine singular noun in construct with a 2nd person feminine singular suffix, identifying the subject of the report as Tamar's own father-in-law.
• 'oleh ("going up", H5927) — qal active participle, masculine singular, describing an action in progress rather than a completed or future act — Judah is presently on his way up.
• timnatah ("to Timnah", H8553 + H9011) — proper place name with the directional he suffix, marking motion toward that location without needing a separate preposition "to."
• lagoz ("to shear", H1494) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed preposition le, expressing purpose: the going up is in order to shear.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative va-yugad ("and it was told", H5046), a hophal form that keeps the agent of the telling unspecified — the text does not say who informed Tamar, only that the information reached her. This is followed by le-Tamar ("to Tamar") and the infinitive le-mor ("saying", H0559), a common formula introducing reported speech.

The content of the report is built around the participle 'oleh ("going up", H5927), which presents Judah's journey as an ongoing action witnessed or reported in the present tense of the discourse, rather than a simple past or future event. The directional he attached to Timnata ("to Timnah") indicates motion toward that place morphologically, without requiring a separate preposition. The purpose of the journey is given by the infinitive construct la-goz ("to shear", H1494) governing tzono ("his sheep/flock", H6629 + H9023), a construct-plus-suffix combination meaning "his flock."

Differences between versions

The Septuagint renders "νύμφῃ αὐτοῦ" ("his daughter-in-law") after Θαμάρ, an addition not present in the Hebrew text, which only has le-Tamar ("to Tamar") without any kinship qualifier at this point. The LXX also uses the plural participle "λέγοντες" ("they saying"), differing from the singular, impersonal Hebrew infinitive le-mor. The Vulgate instead follows the Hebrew more closely in sense, using an indirect subordinate clause ("quod socer illius ascenderet," "that her father-in-law was going up") rather than the direct quotation marked by hineh ("behold", H2009) in the Hebrew and reproduced in the LXX.