Genesis 29:28

Summary

The verse narrates three sequential actions: Jacob complied with an arrangement, completed a specified week, and then received Rachel as a wife. The Hebrew text uses three vav-consecutive verbs to advance the narrative, with the final action's subject left grammatically implicit.

Key words

• Ken ("thus", H3651C) — adverb referring back to a prior proposal or condition, confirming Jacob's compliance.
• yemalle ("he completed", H4390) — piel (intensive) stem of the root for "fill/complete," marking the finishing of a bounded period.
• shevua ("week of", H7620H) — construct-state noun, grammatically bound to zot ("this", H2063), specifying a particular week rather than a week in general.
• yitten ("he gave", H5414O) — qal narrative verb, third-person masculine singular; the subject is not named in this clause and must be inferred from context.
• lo ("to him", H9033) — pronominal suffix on the preposition le, appearing twice in the verse (after "Rachel his daughter" and again before "for a wife"), producing a doubled dative construction.

What the text says

The verse is built on three narrative clauses joined by the vav-consecutive, the standard Biblical Hebrew device for sequential action ("and then... and then..."). The subject of the first two verbs is explicit: Ya'aqov ("Jacob", H3290) both "did" (ya'as) and "completed" (yemalle) the week. The third verb, yitten ("he gave"), has no explicit subject in the Hebrew clause itself — the 3ms verbal form relies entirely on the surrounding narrative context (established earlier in Genesis 29) to identify the giver.

A notable grammatical feature is the repetition of the prepositional phrase lo ("to him", H9033) twice within the same clause: once attached to the verb "gave" (va-yitten-lo) and once after "his daughter" (bitto lo), before the final phrase le-ishah ("for a wife", H0802H). This creates a doubled dative structure around the object Rachel bitto ("Rachel his daughter"), which some translations resolve by simplifying to a single "to him" or by omitting the repetition in translation.

The noun shevua ("week of", H7620H) stands in construct with the demonstrative zot ("this", H2063), tying the completed period to a specific, previously mentioned week rather than a generic seven-day span.

Differences between versions

The LXX explicitly supplies the subject of the giving action as Λαβάν ("Laban"), resolving the grammatical ambiguity that the Hebrew leaves implicit. The Vulgate renders the third clause differently, using duxit uxorem ("[he] took [her] as wife"), which shifts the grammatical subject to Jacob as the one taking Rachel, rather than preserving the Hebrew's construction of someone else "giving" her to him. The Hebrew construct phrase shevua zot ("the week of this") appears in the LXX as τὰ ἕβδομα ταύτης ("the sevens/week-days of this one"), a plural rendering of the singular Hebrew noun.