Genesis 38:3

Summary

The verse narrates three successive actions in the birth of Judah's first son: conception, birth, and naming. The Hebrew text moves through a chain of narrative verbs, ending with the naming of the child as 'Er ("Er", H6147G).

Key words

• Tahar ("she conceived", H2029) — qal narrative verb, third person feminine singular, continuing directly from the events of the previous verse.
• Teled ("she bore", H3205) — qal narrative verb, third person feminine singular, parallel in form to Tahar, keeping the same (feminine) subject.
• Ben ("a son", H1121A) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of the birth.
• yiqra ("he called", H7121H) — qal narrative verb, but here in the third person masculine singular, marking a shift in grammatical subject from the two preceding feminine verbs.
• shem-o ("his name", H8034 + H9023) — construct noun with third-person masculine singular suffix, "name of him," referring to the newborn.

What the text says

The verse is built entirely on the narrative vav-consecutive chain (va-, H9001), a hallmark of Biblical Hebrew storytelling in which each verb is prefixed with "and" and pushes the action forward in sequence: "and she conceived... and she bore... and he called." The first two verbs, Tahar and Teled, are grammatically feminine, agreeing with an unnamed female subject carried over from the wider narrative context (the woman who conceives and gives birth). The third verb, yiqra, switches to the masculine form. This morphological shift is significant: Hebrew verb conjugation encodes gender directly in the verb form itself, so the text signals a change of subject — from "she" (conceiving, bearing) to "he" (naming) — without needing to state a new proper noun. The identity of "he" is not lexically supplied in this verse; it is inferred from the surrounding narrative, where Judah is the acting male figure. The naming formula uses the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) before shem-o ("his name"), a standard construction in Hebrew naming formulas, followed by the name 'Er (H6147G).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew grammar marks the shift in subject purely through verb gender (feminine Tahar/Teled vs. masculine yiqra), a distinction that Greek and Latin verb morphology in the LXX (ἐκάλεσεν) and Vulgate (vocavit) do not overtly display, since these forms are not gender-marked. Several modern translations (RV1909, SBLIBRE) preserve the ambiguity by using a generic third-person verb ("llamó") without specifying who names the child. The BSB resolves this ambiguity explicitly by inserting "Judah" as the subject of the naming clause, a clarification not present as an explicit noun in the Hebrew of this verse itself.