Genesis 39:15

Summary

The verse reports, within Potiphar's wife's speech, that when the man heard her raise her voice and cry out, he abandoned his garment beside her and fled outside. It is a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs describing a rapid sequence of actions: hearing, leaving the garment, fleeing, going out.

Key words

• va.yə.hi ("and it was", H1961) — the classic narrative-opening verb, qal with narrative vav, marking a new story beat ("and then it happened that...").
• khe.sha.mə'.o ("when he heard", H8085G) — infinitive construct with preposition khe ("when/as") and pronominal suffix "his", forming a temporal clause: "in his hearing" = "when he heard".
• ha.ri.mo.ti ("I raised", H7311A) — hiphil (causative) perfect, first person: "I caused [my voice] to rise", a completed action reported as fact within the quoted speech.
• va.'eq.ra' ("and I called out", H7121I) — qal narrative form, continuing the first-person account of her own action.
• bigdo ("his garment", H0899B) construct + 'etzli ("beside me", H0681) construct with suffix — together locate the abandoned object relative to the speaker.

What the text says

The verse opens with the formulaic va.yə.hi ("and it was") followed by an infinitive-construct temporal clause, khe.shamə'o ("when he heard"), a common Hebrew construction for marking simultaneity or sequence without a finite subordinate verb. The content of what he heard is introduced by ki ("that"), which here functions as a subordinating particle reporting speech: "that I raised my voice and I called out" (harimoti qoli va'eqra'). This is the woman's own quoted account of her prior action, using a hiphil perfect (harimoti, "I raised", causative sense — "I caused [my voice] to go up") followed by a qal narrative verb (va'eqra', "and I called out").

After this reported clause, the main narrative resumes with three consecutive vav-narrative verbs: vayya'azov ("and he left/abandoned", H5800A), vayyanas ("and he fled", H5127), vayyetze' ("and he went out", H3318G), each simple qal forms chained by the narrative vav, producing a rapid, unbroken sequence of action. The phrase bigdo 'etzli ("his garment, beside me") uses two construct-state nouns with pronominal suffixes to pinpoint where the garment was left relative to the speaker. The final word, hachutzah ("to the outside", H2351 + directional he, H9011), marks the physical direction of the flight — "outward" — using the directional suffix rather than a preposition.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va'eqra' ("and I called out") with ἐβόησα, matching the sense, but the extant Greek text shows τὴν μου without a noun, apparently missing a word corresponding to "voice" (qoli) that is present in the Hebrew. The LXX also renders vayya'azov as a participle (καταλείπων, "leaving"), subordinating it to the main flight verb, whereas the Hebrew treats "he left" as an independent narrative-vav verb parallel to "he fled" and "he went out". The Vulgate compresses the opening temporal clause (vayehi khe-shom'o ki...) into a simple subordinate clause "et audisset vocem meam" ("and had heard my voice"), omitting the vayehi formula, and renders bigdo ("his garment") as "pallium quod tenebam" ("the cloak that I was holding"), an interpretive addition not present in the Hebrew construct phrase bigdo 'etzli ("his garment beside me").