Abimelech asks these questions to establish his innocence before God by demonstrating he acted on misinformation deliberately provided by both Abraham and Sarah. Rather than stating his defense, the interrogative form invites God to acknowledge the truthfulness of what Abraham and Sarah told him, thereby shifting moral responsibility for the deception away from Abimelech’s integrity.

God acknowledged that Abimelech acted in integrity of heart, confirmed that He Himself had kept Abimelech from sinning by touching Sarah, and explained He would not let Abimelech complete the adultery (Genesis 20:6).

Abimelech’s double question establishes his legal defense by forcing acknowledgment of the facts that led to his innocent error. The interrogative form serves forensic purposes: rather than merely asserting what Abraham and Sarah said, the question format demands God validate these claims as true, thereby making the patriarch’s deception rather than the king’s gullibility the root problem. The Hebrew construction emphasizes personal testimony through the reflexive pronouns, “he himself” (hu’) and “she herself” (hi’), highlighting that both parties independently confirmed the sibling story. Abimelech strategically moves from establishing the factual basis of his mistake to declaring the moral quality of his motives, using covenant language of integrity and innocence that appears throughout Psalms as the vocabulary of the righteous. The question form here demonstrates judicial wisdom: by making God confirm the deception before asserting his innocence, Abimelech builds an irrefutable case that his actions flowed from integrity corrupted only by another’s lie.