Genesis 29:16

Summary

The verse introduces Laban's two daughters, stating that he had two of them and giving their names: the older was called Leah, and the younger was called Rachel.

Key words

• le. ("[belonged] to", H9005) — the preposition attached to la.Van marks possession; the sentence structure "and to Laban [were] two daughters" places Laban, not the daughters, as the syntactic starting point.
• she.Tei ("two", H8147) — feminine dual cardinal number in construct form, binding directly to va.Not ("daughters", H1323G) to form "two of daughters," i.e., "two daughters."
• ge.do.Lah ("old [one]", H1419K) — feminine singular adjective with the definite article ha. (H9009), functioning as a substantive ("the older/great one") rather than modifying an explicit noun.
• ke.ta.Nah ("young [one]", H6996A) — feminine singular adjective with the definite article, parallel in structure to ge.do.Lah, substantivized to mean "the younger one."
• shem ("[the] name of", H8034) — masculine singular construct noun, repeated twice (once for each daughter), each time governing the following substantivized adjective ("the name of the older-one," "the name of the younger-one").

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a possessive construction rather than a verb of existence: u-le-Laban ("and to Laban") followed by she.Tei va.Not ("two of daughters"), literally "and to Laban [were] two daughters." Hebrew does not require an explicit verb "to have" or "to be" here; the possession is expressed purely through the preposition le. attached to Laban's name, with the existence of the daughters implied by the juxtaposition.

The naming formula that follows uses two parallel construct chains: shem ha-gedolah ("the name of the older one") and ve-shem ha-qetannah ("and the name of the younger one"). In both cases, the adjectives gedolah and qetannah carry the definite article and stand alone as substantives — they are not modifying a stated noun like "daughter" but function grammatically as "the older [daughter]" and "the younger [daughter]" through ellipsis. The proper names Le'ah and Rachel follow without any copula, forming a nominal sentence: "the name of the older-one [is] Leah."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening construction with an explicit verb, ēsan ("were"), producing "to Laban were two daughters," making overt what the Hebrew leaves implicit through the bare preposition le. The Vulgate uses habebat ("he had"), shifting the syntactic subject to Laban as an active possessor, whereas the Hebrew's construction centers grammatically on the preposition rather than a possessing subject performing an action. For the second daughter, the Vulgate also varies its verb, using appellabatur ("was called") rather than repeating the "name" construction used for Leah, a stylistic variation not present in the parallel repetition of shem in the Hebrew.