Genesis 38:15

Summary

Judah sees Tamar and mistakes her for a prostitute, the text explaining this misjudgment through the fact that she had covered her face.

Key words

• va-yir'eha — verb qal, narrative form of ra'ah ("he saw", H7200G) with pronominal suffix "her": marks the sequential action opening the scene, "and he saw her."
• va-yachsheveha — verb qal, narrative form of chashav ("he considered", H2803J) with suffix "her": the second sequential action, presenting Judah's inference as a mental act, "and he considered/reckoned her."
• zonah — qal participle feminine singular of a root meaning "the one doing [prostitution]" (H2181), used substantively as "a prostitute"; the participle form casts the identification as an ongoing characterization rather than a fixed noun.
• ki — subordinating particle (H3588A), "for/because," introducing the clause that grounds Judah's assumption.
• kissetah — verb piel perfect of kasah ("she had covered", H3680): the piel (intensive) stem and perfect (completed) aspect mark this as a prior, completed action that explains the preceding narrative verbs.

What the text says

The verse is built on two sequential narrative verbs — va-yir'eha ("and he saw her", H7200G) and va-yachsheveha ("and he considered her", H2803J) — both qal forms with third-person masculine subject (Judah, H3063G) and third-person feminine singular object suffixes referring to Tamar. This chain presents perception and judgment as consecutive, immediate actions: seeing leads directly to an inference. The object of that inference is expressed with the preposition le (H9005) plus the participle zonah (H2181), literally "to a prostitute" — a construction that frames Judah's conclusion as a classification he assigns to her rather than a stated fact about her identity.

The causal clause introduced by ki (H3588A) shifts the verb tense from narrative (vav-consecutive) to perfect: kissetah panei-ha (H3680, H6440H), "she had covered her face." The piel stem of kasah intensifies the covering, and the perfect aspect marks it as an action completed prior to Judah's seeing her — grammatically explaining why the narrative verbs of seeing and judging could occur as they did. The noun panim ("face", H6440H) appears in construct plural form with the pronominal suffix "her," a standard construct pattern for body-part nouns. The Hebrew thus presents the sequence as: covering (prior, completed) → seeing → judging, with ki making explicit that the covering is the stated ground for Judah's misjudgment.

Differences between versions

The LXX adds a clause absent from the Hebrew: καὶ οὐκ ἐπέγνω αὐτήν ("and he did not recognize her"), which is not present in the Hebrew text given. The Vulgate similarly expands with ne agnosceretur ("so that she would not be recognized"), making explicit a purpose that the Hebrew ki clause states only as cause, not intent.