Genesis 27:30

Summary

The verse marks the precise transition between two actions: Isaac has just finished blessing Jacob, and the moment Jacob leaves his father's presence, Esau arrives from hunting. The Hebrew frames this as a tight sequence of events using two parallel "and it happened" clauses.

Key words

• vaYehi ("and it was", H1961) — narrative verb form used twice in this verse, each time opening a temporal clause ("and it happened that...").
• ka'asher ("as/just as", H0834D) — relative particle marking the first clause as strictly simultaneous/consecutive to what follows: "just as Isaac had finished."
• killah ("he had finished", H3615) — piel perfect, an intensive stem indicating a completed, deliberate action of finishing.
• yatzo yatza ("had indeed gone out", H3318) — the infinitive absolute yatzo placed before the perfect verb yatza doubles the root, producing emphasis: Jacob had truly/just gone out.
• penei ("face of", H6440) — construct noun forming the idiom "from the face of," i.e., from the presence of a person.

What the text says

The verse is built on two successive clauses each introduced by vaYehi (H1961), a narrative structure that signals "and then it happened that..." The first clause uses ka'asher (H0834D) with killah (H3615) in the piel perfect to state that Isaac had finished the act of blessing — the piel stem here conveys the completion of a deliberate, intensive act rather than a simple state. The infinitive construction le-varekh ("to bless", H1288) names the action Isaac was completing.

The second vaYehi clause contains the adverb 'akh ("surely", H0389) followed by the infinitive absolute yatzo plus the finite perfect yatza (both H3318). This doubling of the same root is a common Hebrew emphatic device: it does not add a new verb but intensifies the single action, suggesting Jacob had barely or just stepped out. The phrase me'et penei Yitzchak aviv ("from with the face of Isaac his father") uses the construct noun penei (H6440) to express "from the presence of," a spatial idiom rather than a literal reference to a face. The final clause shifts to Esau, marked by the conjunction ve- ("and"), reporting his arrival mi-tzeido ("from his hunting", H6718A) in a plain qal perfect, ba' ("he came", H0935).

Differences between versions

The LXX adds τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ("his son") after "Jacob," a descriptive addition not present in the Hebrew word list, which only names Jacob without the appositive "his son." The Vulgate compresses both Hebrew vaYehi clauses and the emphatic infinitive absolute construction yatzo yatza into a single sentence, "Vix Isaac sermonem impleverat" ("Isaac had scarcely finished speaking"), rendering 'akh ("surely", H0389) as "vix" ("scarcely") and losing the doubled-root emphasis on Jacob's departure. The Vulgate also renders me'et penei Yitzchak aviv ("from the presence of Isaac his father") simply as "foras" ("outside"), omitting explicit mention of the father's presence found in the Hebrew construct phrase with penei (H6440).