Genesis 25:34

Summary

The verse concludes the birthright episode: Jacob gives Esau bread and lentil stew, Esau eats, drinks, rises, and leaves, and the narrator states that Esau despised his birthright. The Hebrew presents this as a rapid chain of actions following the meal.

Key words

• natan ("he gave", H5414) — qal perfect, not part of the following narrative chain; combined with the preceding conjunction and the subject Ya'akov placed before the verb, it opens the verse as a background clause ("Now Jacob had given...") rather than continuing a sequence.
• nezid ("cooked food of", H5138) — masculine singular construct, meaning it must be bound to the following noun; it does not stand alone but forms the phrase "stew of lentils" with adashim.
• yivez ("he despised", H0959) — qal narrative (wayyiqtol) form, the final verb of the chain, presenting the despising as the last event in the same narrative sequence as eating, drinking, rising, and going.
• et (H0853) — direct object marker before ha-bekhorah, marking "the birthright" as the direct object of yivez, with no independent meaning of its own.
• bekhorah ("birthright", H1062) — feminine singular noun with the definite article ha ("the"), specifying a particular, already-established birthright rather than birthright in a general sense.

What the text says

The verse opens with ve-Ya'akov natan — conjunction, subject, then a qal perfect verb — rather than the vav-consecutive (narrative) form used for the rest of the verse. This subject-before-verb order sets the giving of the food as a discrete statement, distinguished from the tightly linked chain of actions that follows: yiokhal ("he ate", H0398), yeshet ("he drank", H8354), yakom ("he arose", H6965), yelakh ("he went", H1980), and yivez ("he despised", H0959), all narrative (wayyiqtol) forms. This grammatical form ties the five actions into one continuous, rapid sequence with a single implied subject, Esau, even though his name only reappears explicitly at the final verb, yivez. The construct phrase nezid adashim ("stew of lentils") functions as a single description of the food, paired with lechem ("bread", H3899) as what Jacob gave. The object marker et before the defined noun ha-bekhorah marks the birthright as the specific thing acted upon by the despising.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate adds the clause parvipendens quod primogenita vendidisset ("thinking little of it, because he had sold the birthright"), explicitly mentioning the prior sale, a detail not repeated in the Hebrew of this verse, which states only that Esau yivez ("despised") the bekhorah ("birthright") without restating the act of selling. The LXX text as given shows two spellings of Esau's name within the same verse, Ἠσαὺ and Ἠεσὺ, a variation not reflected in the Hebrew, which consistently uses 'Esav (H6215).