Genesis 39:14

Summary

Potiphar's wife calls the men of her household and tells them that a Hebrew man was brought to the house to mock them, that he came to lie with her, and that she cried out with a loud voice. The verse frames her accusation as direct speech introduced by the formula "she said to them, saying."

Key words

• tik.Ra' ("she called out", H7121I) — qal narrative form; opens the verse and is echoed later in the same root ('ekra'), forming a frame around her account of the incident.
• He.vi' ("he has brought", H0935P) — hiphil (causative) perfect; the causative stem indicates someone caused the man to come in, though the subject ("he") is not named within the verse itself.
• 'iv.Ri ("a Hebrew", H5680) — gentilic adjective modifying 'ish ("a man", H0376G); identifies the accused by ethnicity rather than by name.
• Tza.chek ("mock", H6711) — piel (intensive) infinitive; the intensive stem conveys a strengthened or repeated sense of mocking/toying, governed by the preposition le ("to/for").
• sh.Kav ("lie", H7901I) — qal infinitive following li ("to"), paired with 'i.M ("with", H5973A) + suffix "me," stating the purpose attributed to the man's approach.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of narrative-vav verbs (va-tikra, va-tomer) that move the story forward, followed by a quotation introduced by the infinitive le-mor ("saying", H0559). Inside the quotation, the imperative re'u ("see", H7200I, plural) addresses the household men directly, then shifts to a report using perfect-tense verbs: hevi ("he has brought") and ba ("he came", H0935G) describe completed actions. The hiphil form of hevi is causative but leaves its subject unstated in this verse — grammatically only "he" — so the Hebrew itself does not name who brought the man in.

The two purpose clauses, le-tzachek banu ("to mock us") and lishkav 'immi ("to lie with me"), both use prepositional infinitives, a common Hebrew construction for expressing intention or purpose. The closing clause returns to first person with va-eqra' be-qol gadol ("and I called out with a great voice"), using the same root as the opening va-tikra', so the woman's own outcry is described with the identical verb used for her calling the servants — a repetition visible only in the Hebrew.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'ish 'ivri ("a Hebrew man", H0376G/H5680) as παῖδα Ἑβραῖον ("a Hebrew servant/boy"), differing from the Hebrew's plain "man." The Hebrew hevi ("he has brought") leaves the subject unspecified; the SBLIBRE Spanish translation supplies "Mi esposo" ("my husband") as the explicit subject, which is not present in the Hebrew text of this verse. The Vulgate compresses the two narrative verbs va-tikra and va-tomer into a single sequence ("vocavit... et ait"), preserving the two actions but without the repeated narrative-vav structure visible in the Hebrew.