Genesis 27:46

Summary

Rebekah tells Isaac that she loathes her life because of the Hittite women (benot Chet), and states that if Jacob takes a wife from among them, life will have no value for her. The verse frames her complaint as a rhetorical question about the purpose of continuing to live under such circumstances.

Key words

• Katzti ("I loathe", H6973) — qal perfect, first person: a completed, stative action expressing present disgust, not a repeated or ongoing process.
• chaiYai ("my life", H2416E) — masculine plural noun in construct form with the suffix "my"; the plural form is the standard Hebrew way of expressing "life" as an abstract totality, not indicating multiple lives.
• peNei ("face of / because of", H6440I) — plural construct noun, here used idiomatically with the preposition mi ("from") to mean "on account of."
• loKeach ("[is] taking", H3947I) — qal participle, masculine singular: presents Jacob's potential marriage as an ongoing or imminent possibility rather than a completed or hypothetical past event, reinforcing the conditional im ("if", H0518A).
• lamah li chaiYim ("why to me life", H4100 + H9005+H9030 + H2416E) — an interrogative construction without a verb, literally "why, to-me, life?" — a nominal rhetorical question rather than a full clause with "to want" or "to be worth."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with the narrative verb Tomer ("she said", H0559) introducing direct speech from RivKah ("Rebekah", H7259) to YitzChak ("Isaac", H3327). Her statement begins with Katzti bechaiYai ("I loathe in my life"), a perfect-tense verb with a prepositional phrase using be- ("in") — a construction that expresses aversion "with respect to" her life, rather than loathing life as a direct object. The cause is given through mipeNei benot Chet ("because of the daughters of Heth"), stacking two construct chains (peNei + benot) that in Hebrew narrative prose commonly mark causation.

The conditional clause im-loKeach Ya'akov ishah mibenot-Chet uses a participle (loKeach) rather than a finite verb, which in Hebrew conditional sentences often conveys an event framed as imminent or characteristic rather than a single completed action. The phrase ka'Elleh mibenot ha'Aretz ("like these, from the daughters of the land") repeats and intensifies the identification of the Hittite women with "the land," reinforcing the geographic/ethnic framing of the complaint. The closing question, lamah li chaiYim ("why to me life"), lacks a verb entirely in the Hebrew — it is a bare nominal question, literally "why, to me, life?", which each version must supply a verb to render intelligibly.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the closing question as nolo vivere ("I do not want to live"), supplying a verb of desire absent in the Hebrew's verbless construction. The LXX text given is truncated but shows Προσώχθικα τῇ ζωῇ ("I am vexed/angered at [my] life"), using a finite perfect verb with a dative, differing from the Hebrew's be- preposition construction. The Spanish RV1909 and SBLIBRE translations also supply verbs ("¿para qué quiero la vida?" / "más me valdría morir") to render the verbless Hebrew question, each choosing different verbal nuances (wanting vs. being worth it) not explicit in the source text.