Genesis 27:14

Summary

Genesis 27:14 narrates Jacob's compliance with his mother's plan: he goes, takes the young goats, and brings them to his mother, who then prepares the savory dish exactly as his father liked it. The verse consists of four rapid narrative actions—three by Jacob, one by his mother—linked by the Hebrew narrative vav.

Key words

• va-yyēlekh ("and he went", H1980) — qal narrative form; opens the chain of consecutive actions, marking simple sequential movement.
• va-yyiqqaḥ ("and he took/fetched", H3947) — qal narrative form; the second link in the action-chain, denoting Jacob physically taking the items.
• va-yyāḇēʾ ("and he brought", H0935) — hiphil narrative form, causative; unlike the previous two qal verbs, this stem indicates Jacob "caused [the goats] to come" to his mother, not merely that he arrived.
• maṭʿammîm ("savory foods", H4303) — masculine plural noun; the plural form indicates more than one prepared dish or portion, not a single dish.
• kaʾăsher ("just as", H0834) — relative particle combined with the preposition "as", introducing the comparison clause that ties the food's preparation to the father's taste.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a tight chain of four vayyiqtol (narrative) verbs: va-yyēlekh, va-yyiqqaḥ, va-yyāḇēʾ, and va-ttaʿas ("and she made", H6213). The first three share Jacob as subject and move in quick succession—go, take, bring—while the fourth verb shifts the subject to "his mother" (ʾimmô, H0517 with suffix H9023), who performs the actual cooking. This subject shift, marked only by the verb's gender (masculine for Jacob's actions, feminine ta- prefix for the mother's), shows the division of labor: Jacob supplies the raw material, his mother transforms it into the dish.

The verb va-yyāḇēʾ is notably in the hiphil stem, distinguishing "he brought" from a simple qal "he came"; the causative sense underlines that Jacob actively delivered the goats to his mother's location. The final clause, "kaʾăsher ʾāhēḇ ʾāḇîw" ("as his father loved", H0157 in the perfect), uses a completed-action verb to describe a settled, prior habit of taste—not a one-time preference expressed in that moment.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew maṭʿammîm is plural ("savory foods"), but the RV1909 renders it as plural "guisados," while the BSB and SBLIBRE render it as singular "tasty food" / "guiso sabroso," collapsing the plural into one dish. The BSB also adds "two goats" as the object Jacob brought, a specification not present in this verse's Hebrew wording (the goats were mentioned earlier in the chapter, not repeated here). The Vulgate compresses the three Hebrew action-verbs (went, took, brought) into "Abiit, et attulit, deditque" ("he went, and brought, and gave"), replacing the causative "brought" with "gave" (dedit) for the final action toward the mother, differing slightly from the Hebrew's single "brought to."