Genesis 39:17

Summary

Potiphar's wife speaks to her husband, repeating the same accusation she had made to the household servants: that "the Hebrew slave" he had brought into the house came to her "to mock/toy with" her. The verse frames her speech as a direct report using the formula "according to these words, saying."

Key words

• te.daBer ("she spoke", H1696G) — piel narrative form of the verb, expressing an intensive or deliberate act of speaking rather than a neutral statement.
• devaRim ("words", H1697G) — plural noun preceded by ka ("according to the"), establishing that what follows repeats a prior set of words, i.e., the same speech given earlier.
• ba' ("he came", H0935G) — qal perfect, marking a completed action: the entry into her presence is presented as an accomplished fact from her point of view.
• heVeta ("you brought", H0935P) — hiphil (causative) perfect, shifting the same root H0935 from "to come" (qal) to "to cause to come/bring," directly accusing Potiphar of having caused the servant's presence in the house.
• leTzaChek ("to mock", H6711) — piel infinitive with prefixed le- ("to/in order to"), stating the alleged purpose of the servant's approach as intensive mockery or humiliating play.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav on va.tedaBer ("and she spoke"), continuing the story sequence and identifying the subject as female (the piel form and feminine agreement point to Potiphar's wife, referenced earlier in the chapter). The phrase ka.devaRim ha.'Elleh ("according to these words") explicitly signals that her speech to her husband duplicates a formula already used, though the text here presents only this occurrence's content.

The accusation itself is built on two forms of the same root H0935 ("to come"): first the qal perfect ba' ("he came"), describing the servant's own action, then the hiphil perfect heVeta ("you brought"), describing Potiphar's causative role in placing the servant in the household. This root-repetition creates a grammatical link between the servant's entry and the husband's earlier action of bringing him in, embedding responsibility into the sentence structure itself.

The stated purpose clause, le.tzaChek bi ("to mock me"), uses the piel infinitive of H6711, an intensive form suggesting deliberate or repeated action rather than a single casual gesture.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the purpose clause not only as empaixai moi ("to mock me") but adds a further reported statement, kai eipen moi koimēthēti met' emou ("and he said to me, 'Lie with me'"), which has no corresponding Hebrew wording in the given data. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew more closely with ut illuderet mihi ("to mock/deceive me"), matching the leTzaChek clause without the additional LXX statement.