Genesis 7:5

Summary

The verse reports that Noah acted in full accordance with a prior divine command. The sentence uses standard Hebrew narrative structure to mark this as the concluding, completed action following God's instructions given in the preceding verses.

Key words

• va-yya'as ("and he did", H6213A) — qal narrative form, prefixed with the narrative vav; expresses the next sequential event in the story, i.e., Noah's action following the command.
• Noach ("Noah", H5146) — proper noun, grammatical subject of the sentence, placed immediately after the verb per typical verb-subject word order.
• kol ("all", H3605) — governed by the preposition ke ("according to", H9004); together they form kekhol ("according to all"), signaling totality — nothing was left out of Noah's compliance.
• tzivvahu ("he commanded him", H6680 + H9033) — piel perfect verb with a pronominal suffix; the piel stem carries an intensive/causative nuance ("to charge, command firmly"), and the perfect aspect marks the commanding as an action completed prior to Noah's doing.
• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the subject of the relative clause, positioned at the very end of the verse, so the sentence closes by naming the source of the command.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause opens with the narrative verb va-yya'as ("and he did"), which in Biblical Hebrew narrative typically launches the next event in a sequence — here, Noah's compliance follows directly from what was commanded earlier in the chapter. The subject Noach follows the verb, consistent with the verb-subject order common in Hebrew narrative prose.

The core of the sentence is the phrase kekhol asher tzivvahu Yehovah ("according to all that Yehovah commanded him"). The relative particle asher ("that", H0834A) introduces a subordinate clause whose predicate is tzivvahu, a piel perfect verb with third-person masculine singular suffix ("him"). Because the perfect tense here describes an action anterior to the main verb va-yya'as, the clause functions with a pluperfect sense in translation ("had commanded"), even though Hebrew itself does not grammatically distinguish perfect from pluperfect the way English does — this nuance is inferred from the narrative sequence, not marked morphologically.

The word kol ("all") emphasizes totality: Noah's action matched the command in its entirety, with no partial compliance indicated by the grammar. The sentence ends with the divine name Yehovah, placed in final position, so that the last word of the verse identifies the source of the authority behind Noah's action.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the divine name as κύριος ὁ θεός ("the Lord God") where the Hebrew text has only Yehovah (H3068G), without a corresponding word for "God." The Vulgate's Dominus ("Lord") corresponds to the single Hebrew name without addition, aligning more closely with the Hebrew in this respect than the LXX does.