Genesis 7:19

Summary

Genesis 7:19 describes the waters of the flood intensifying to an extreme degree over the earth, resulting in the covering of all the high mountains that exist under the entire sky. The verse marks the climactic point of the flood's rise, using repetition and totalizing language to convey the completeness of the inundation.

Key words

• ga.ve.Ru ("they increased", H1396) — qal perfect, third person plural; denotes a completed action of the waters "prevailing" or "growing strong," setting up the main verb before the repeated intensifier.
• me.'Od ("exceedingly", H3966) — appears twice in immediate succession (words 5–6), a doubling construction that intensifies the degree of the waters' increase beyond a single use of the term.
• y.khu.Su ("they were covered", H3680) — pual (intensive passive) verb with narrative vav, indicating the mountains underwent a thorough covering action, with the passive voice placing focus on the mountains as recipients rather than on an agent.
• kol ("all", H3605) — construct noun appearing twice (words 12 and 19), each time linking to what follows ("all the mountains," "all the heavens"), reinforcing totality at two structural points in the sentence.
• Ta.chat ("under", H8478G) — construct noun functioning prepositionally, connecting the mountains' location to "all the heavens," expressing spatial totality from below.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides into two clauses joined by the narrative vav on y.khu.Su ("and they were covered"). The first clause establishes the cause: ha.Ma.yim ("the waters", H4325G) as subject of ga.ve.Ru ("they increased", H1396), a qal perfect verb indicating completed, forceful action. This verb is modified by the doubled me.'Od me.'Od ("exceedingly exceedingly", H3966), a grammatical repetition not typically rendered twice in translation but present in the Hebrew as an intensifying device, followed by the prepositional phrase 'al-ha.'Aretz ("upon the earth", H0776G).

The second clause shifts to a pual verb, y.khu.Su ("they were covered", H3680), the intensive passive form placing the mountains — kol-he.ha.Rim ha.ge.vo.Him ("all the high mountains") — as grammatical subject of a passive action rather than naming an agent. The relative clause 'a.Sher-Ta.chat kol-ha.sha.Ma.yim ("which [were] under all the heavens") uses the construct noun Ta.chat ("under", H8478G) to link the mountains' location spatially to the totality of the sky above, with kol ("all", H3605) repeated to bracket the extent of both the mountains and the heavens.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew me.'Od me.'Od ("exceedingly exceedingly") as σφόδρα σφοδρῶς, preserving the doubling with two related but distinct Greek forms (adverb and adverbial form), whereas the Vulgate uses a single term, nimis ("exceedingly"), collapsing the Hebrew repetition into one word. The BSB translates the doubled intensifier as "completely," interpreting the emphasis rather than reproducing the repetition, while the SBLIBRE similarly does not preserve a doubled term, instead using "tanto" ("so much") to convey degree.