Genesis 29:11

Summary

The verse narrates three sequential actions: Jacob kissed Rachel, then lifted up his voice, and then wept. The Hebrew presents these as three distinct narrative verbs joined by the narrative vav, forming a chain of events rather than a single description.

Key words

• va-yishaq ("and he kissed", H5401A) — qal narrative verb, marking the first event in the sequence: Jacob's action toward Rachel.
• va-yissa ("and he lifted up", H5375N) — qal narrative verb, the second link in the chain, governing the object "his voice."
• qol ("voice", H6963A) — masculine singular noun in construct form, meaning "voice of," bound to the following suffix to produce "his voice."
• o ("his", H9023) — pronominal suffix attached to qol, specifying whose voice is lifted (Jacob's).
• va-yevk ("and he wept", H1058) — qal narrative verb, the third and final action in the sequence.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three narrative verbs, each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001): va-yishaq ("and he kissed"), va-yissa ("and he lifted up"), and va-yevk ("and he wept"). This grammatical structure presents the actions as sequential and discrete steps rather than as a single compound event. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before qolo signals that "his voice" is the grammatical object of the verb "lifted up," producing the idiomatic construction "he lifted up his voice," which in Biblical Hebrew narrative typically precedes or accompanies weeping to indicate that the weeping was audible or vocal in nature.

The construct form of qol ("voice of") combined with the suffix -o ("his") creates a possessive phrase, "his voice," identifying Jacob as the one whose voice is raised. The three-verb sequence — kissing, voice-lifting, weeping — gives the Hebrew a stepwise, almost cinematic quality that some translations compress into fewer clauses.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the second and third Hebrew verbs together as βοήσας τῇ φωνῇ αὐτοῦ ἔκλαυσεν ("having cried out with his voice, he wept"), using a participle (βοήσας) to subordinate the "voice-lifting" action to the main verb "wept," differing from the Hebrew's three coordinate narrative verbs. The Vulgate's elevata voce flevit ("with voice raised, he wept") similarly subordinates the voice-lifting into an ablative absolute construction rather than presenting it as a separate finite verb, as the Hebrew does with va-yissa. The BSB collapses the second and third Hebrew verbs into the single phrase "wept aloud," which conveys the sense but does not preserve the sequential three-verb structure of the Hebrew. The SBLIBRE adds "de alegría" ("for joy"), an interpretive addition not present in any of the source texts shown, which specify the cause or nature of the weeping.