Genesis 25:28

Summary

The verse states that Isaac loved Esau, giving as reason that wild game was in his mouth, while Rebekah loved Jacob. The sentence pairs two parallel but grammatically distinct statements about each parent's affection.

Key words

• yitzChak ("Isaac", H3327) — subject of the first clause, a proper name in construct with the verb of loving.
• yeeHav ("he loved", H0157G) — qal wayyiqtol (narrative past) form; a completed act of loving expressed as part of the story's sequence of events.
• tzayid ("wild game", H6718A) — masculine singular noun, the item said to be "in his mouth," functioning as the stated cause (ki, H3588A) for Isaac's love.
• be-pi ("in his mouth", H6310G + H9023) — construct noun with pronominal suffix "his," a fixed expression describing what Isaac consumed or desired.
• ohevet ("loving/one who loves", H0157G) — qal active participle, feminine singular, describing Rebekah's love as an ongoing state rather than a single completed action.

What the text says

The verse divides into two halves joined by ve- ("and", H9002). In the first half, yeeHav is a wayyiqtol verb — the standard narrative past tense used for sequential events in Biblical Hebrew storytelling. This form presents Isaac's love for Esau as an event that happened, explained immediately by the causal particle ki ("for/because", H3588A): tzayid be-fi ("wild game was in his mouth"). The construct phrase be-fi with the third-person masculine suffix ("his mouth") is a compact expression; the noun tzayid ("wild game", H6718A) refers to what Esau hunted, though the grammar of this half-verse does not explicitly restate "Esau's" game — the suffix "his" is grammatically ambiguous within the clause alone but is anchored contextually to Esau.

In the second half, ohevet is not a wayyiqtol verb but a qal participle, feminine singular. Hebrew participles denote ongoing or characteristic states rather than single completed actions. This creates a grammatical asymmetry: Isaac's love is grammatically framed as a narrated event tied to a stated cause, while Rebekah's love is framed as a continuous disposition, with no causal clause attached to it in the Hebrew text itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causal clause as ἡ θήρα αὐτοῦ βρῶσις αὐτῷ ("his game was food for him"), adding the word "food" (βρῶσις) where the Hebrew simply says tzayid be-fi ("game in his mouth"), making explicit an idea the Hebrew phrase leaves more compact. The Vulgate similarly expands with de venationibus illius vesceretur ("he used to eat of his hunting"), turning the Hebrew's static noun phrase into a verb of eating (vesceretur), which is not morphologically present in the Hebrew clause. Modern translations like BSB ("had a taste for wild game") and SBLIBRE ("le gustaba comer") likewise interpret the terse Hebrew idiom as referring to Isaac's appetite or preference, an interpretive expansion beyond the Hebrew's bare construct phrase.