Genesis 28:10

Summary

The verse narrates Jacob's departure from Beer-sheba and his journey toward Haran. Two consecutive narrative verbs mark the sequence of movement: leaving one place and heading to another.

Key words

• va-yetze ("and he went out", H3318I) — qal verb with narrative vav, indicating the first sequential action: departure from a location.
• Ya'akov ("Jacob", H3290) — proper name, subject of both verbs in the verse.
• Be'er Shava ("Beer-sheba", H0884) — proper place name, marked with the preposition mi ("from", H9006) to indicate the point of origin.
• va-yelekh ("and he went", H1980G) — second qal verb with narrative vav, continuing the sequence: the act of traveling.
• Charanah ("toward Haran", H2771A + H9011) — place name with the directional he suffix, which specifies motion toward a destination rather than simple location.

What the text says

The verse is built on two parallel narrative clauses, each opened by a vav-consecutive verb (va-yetze ... va-yelekh), a standard construction in Biblical Hebrew narrative for sequencing events. The first clause establishes the point of departure using the preposition mi ("from", H9006) attached to Be'er Shava, so the place-name itself carries the grammatical marker of origin. The second clause uses the directional he suffix attached to Charan, producing Charanah — a form that grammatically encodes "toward Haran" without needing a separate preposition. This is a feature that Hebrew narrative uses regularly for destinations, and it cannot be rendered by a suffix in English or Spanish, which instead require prepositions like "toward" or "hacia" to convey the same directional sense.

The subject Ya'akov (H3290) appears only once, governing both verbs, which keeps the sentence compact: departure and destination are presented as a single continuous motion rather than two separate reported actions.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Be'er Shava not as a transliterated proper name but as a descriptive phrase, "τοῦ φρέατος τοῦ ὅρκου" ("the well of the oath"), translating the place-name's components rather than preserving it as a toponym, unlike the Hebrew, the Vulgate ("Bersabee"), and the modern translations (BSB "Beersheba", RV1909 "Beer-seba", SBLIBRE "Beerseba"), which all keep it as a proper name.