Genesis 25:22

Summary

The verse narrates that the children inside Rebekah's womb struggled against one another, prompting her to voice a distressed question, after which she went to seek an oracle from Yehovah. The Hebrew text moves through four sequential narrative actions linked by the vav-consecutive chain typical of biblical prose.

Key words

• yitrotzatzu ("they struggled together", H7533) — hithpael stem, marking a reciprocal or mutual action: the children struggle with each other, not merely individually.
• banim ("children", H1121A) — masculine plural noun with definite article, referring to the two unborn sons collectively.
• qirbah ("her inward part", H7130G) — construct singular noun with pronominal suffix "her," locating the struggle inside Rebekah's body.
• lamah zeh anokhi ("why [is] this I", H4100/H2088/H0595) — an idiomatic string combining interrogative, demonstrative, and personal pronoun, producing a compressed exclamation of distress without a finite verb.
• lidrosh ("to consult/seek", H1875) — qal infinitive construct, expressing purpose: she goes in order to seek Yehovah.

What the text says

The verse is built on four consecutive verbal clauses, each introduced by the narrative va ("and," H9001), which is the standard device for advancing action in Hebrew narrative prose. The first clause uses the hithpael form yitrotzatzu ("they struggled together," H7533), a stem that inherently expresses reciprocity — the children act upon one another, not simply move independently. This is followed by the locative phrase be-qirbah ("in her inward part[s]," H7130G with suffix H9024), which situates the action internally, within Rebekah's body.

Rebekah's response, introduced by va-tomer ("and she said," H0559), consists of the conditional particle im ("if," H0518A) followed by ken ("thus," H3651C), then the compressed phrase lamah zeh anokhi (H4100, H2088, H0595). This phrase lacks an explicit verb, relying on the juxtaposition of the interrogative "why," the demonstrative "this," and the personal pronoun "I" — a construction that Hebrew allows but that requires supplying a verb ("is," "am," "happens") in translation. The final clause uses the qal infinitive lidrosh ("to consult," H1875) governed by the preposition li ("to," H9005), expressing the purpose of her going: to seek Yehovah (et-YHWH, with the untranslated object marker H0853).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening verb as eskirton ("were leaping/skipping"), a milder image than the Hebrew hithpael's reciprocal "struggled together." The Vulgate's collidebantur ("were colliding") more closely preserves the mutual-clash sense of the Hebrew. For Rebekah's exclamation, the LXX reads "if it is to be thus for me, why this to me," while the Vulgate expands interpretively with "quid necesse fuit concipere" ("what need was there to conceive"), an addition not present in the Hebrew's terse lamah zeh anokhi. Modern translations reflect this ambiguity differently: BSB renders it as "why is this happening to me," while RV1909 gives "para qué vivo yo" ("why do I live"), both supplying a verb absent in the Hebrew construction.