Genesis 26:30

Summary

The verse narrates that a feast was prepared for a group of people, who then ate and drank. The three actions — preparing, eating, drinking — are presented as a sequential chain of events in the narrative.

Key words

• va-ya'as ("and he prepared", H6213) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine singular; the narrative vav links this action as the next event in the sequence, following whatever precedes in the story.
• la-hem ("for them", H9038 with H9005) — preposition plus pronominal suffix, indicating the beneficiaries of the feast; the text names them only by pronoun, not by explicit noun, at this point in the verse.
• mishteh ("a feast", H4960) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of the preparing; a feast or drinking-occasion.
• va-yokhlu ("and they ate", H0398) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine plural; continues the chain of action with a plural subject.
• va-yishtu ("and they drank", H8354) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine plural; closes the sequence begun by "he prepared."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built entirely on narrative vav constructions (va- + verb), a common structural device that presents a series of consecutive completed actions: someone prepared (va-ya'as) a feast (mishteh) for "them" (la-hem), then "they" ate (va-yokhlu) and "they" drank (va-yishtu). The subject of the first verb is marked only by the third-person singular verb form itself, without an explicit noun in this verse; the identity of "he" and of "them" depends on context outside this verse. Similarly, the subjects of "they ate" and "they drank" are marked by the plural verb forms alone, without a named noun.

The verb sequence mirrors typical Biblical Hebrew narrative style, where one va- verb after another advances the story action by action: preparation, then eating, then drinking, in that order. The noun mishteh ("a feast", H4960) functions as the object of the preparing-verb, naming what was made ready for the unspecified "them" (la-hem).

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) restructures the ending: instead of paralleling "they ate and they drank" as two coordinate finite verbs (as in the Hebrew va-yokhlu / va-yishtu and the LXX ἔφαγον / ἔπιον), it uses the nominal construction "post cibum et potum" ("after food and drink"), turning the two Hebrew verbs into two nouns governed by a preposition. The Hebrew and the LXX (Swete) both preserve the verb-verb-verb chain (ἐποίησεν, ἔφαγον, ἔπιον) matching va-ya'as, va-yokhlu, va-yishtu, while some modern translations (BSB, SBLIBRE) supply the proper name "Isaac" as the subject of "prepared," a specification not present in the Hebrew text of this verse itself, which uses only the verb form without a named subject.