Genesis 38:5

Summary

The verse narrates the birth of a third son to Judah's Canaanite wife, whom she names Shelah, followed by a notice locating the birth at Kezib. The sentence continues the narrative chain of the two previous births (Er and Onan) using the same verbal pattern.

Key words

• To.sef ("she repeated/added", H3254G) — hiphil (causative) form of the root meaning "to add," here functioning idiomatically with 'Od ("again", H5750) to express "she conceived again" or "did so again."
• Te.led ("she bore", H3205) — qal narrative form, the standard verb for giving birth, third of the sequential verbs describing the birth events.
• tik.Ra' ("she called", H7121H) — qal narrative, marking the naming act performed by the mother, parallel to the naming of her first two sons.
• she.Lah ("Shelah", H7956) — proper name, morphologically unexplained by the text itself (unlike the naming notices for Er and Onan elsewhere, no etymology is given here).
• lid.Ta ("bore", H3205, infinitive construct) — same root as Te.led, here in infinitival form with the suffix -ah ("her"), forming the temporal clause "when she bore him."

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — To.sef, Te.led, tik.Ra', and the sequential perfect ha.Yah ("he was", H1961) — which carries the story forward: she added/continued, she bore, she called, and [Judah] was [at Kezib]. The construction To.sef... 'Od ("she repeated... again") is a common Hebrew idiom for resuming or repeating an action, here signaling a third birth after the two previously narrated.

The final clause, ha.Yah bi-Kh.Ziv be-lid.Tah 'oto ("he was in Kezib when she bore him"), uses the infinitive construct lid.Ta with the preposition be- ("when/in") to form a temporal clause anchoring the birth to a specific place, Kezib. The subject of ha.Yah is grammatically ambiguous in the consonantal text — it could refer to Judah or to the location of the event — since the pronoun is not made explicit beyond the verb's third-person masculine singular form.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew place name kh.Ziv ("Kezib", H3580) appears in the LXX as Χασβὶ (Chasbi), a different transliteration/place-form. The LXX also renders the final clause as ἡνίκα ἒτεκεν αὐτούς ("when she bore them," plural), where the Hebrew has the singular suffix 'oto ("him"). The Vulgate diverges further: it adds "Tertium quoque peperit" ("she also bore a third"), an explicit numbering absent from the Hebrew, and replaces the Kezib notice with "quo nato, parere ultra cessavit" ("once he was born, she ceased bearing further"), a statement not present in the Hebrew text at all.