Genesis 29:35

Summary

Leah conceives and bears a fourth son. She names him Judah, explaining the name through a statement of praise directed at Yehovah. The verse closes by noting that she stopped bearing children at this point.

Key words

• ta.har ("she conceived", H2029) — qal narrative form, continuing the chain of sequential actions that structures the verse.
• 'o.Deh ("I will praise", H3034) — hiphil imperfect, first-person; the causative stem here carries the sense of giving praise/thanks, and its root (ידה) sonically echoes the name Yehudah.
• ka.re.'Ah ("she called", H7121H) — qal perfect, marking a completed act distinct from the surrounding narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs; it introduces the naming formula.
• yehudah ("Judah", H3063G) — proper name, morphologically linked to the root of 'o.Deh.
• ta.'a.Mod ("she stopped", H5975G) — qal narrative form followed by the infinitive Le.det ("bearing children", H3205), forming a verb + infinitive construction expressing cessation of an action.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — Ta.har, Te.led, To.mer — each meaning "and then she conceived," "and then she bore," "and then she said," which is the standard way Biblical Hebrew narrates sequential events. This chain is broken once, at ka.re.'Ah ("she called," H7121H), which appears in the perfect rather than the narrative form; the grammar marks the naming statement as a distinct, explanatory clause set apart from the ongoing story sequence, introduced by 'al-ken ("therefore," H5921A + H3651C).

The explanation for the name centers on 'o.Deh ("I will praise," H3034), a hiphil imperfect from the root ידה. The name yehudah ("Judah," H3063G) shares this root, so the naming clause explains the name through a sound and sense connection between the verb of praise and the name itself — a connection visible in the Hebrew consonants but not necessarily preserved in translation.

The final clause uses ta.'a.Mod ("she stopped," H5975G) combined with the infinitive Le.det ("bearing children," H3205), a verb-plus-infinitive construction that expresses the halting of a continuous prior action — Leah's childbearing.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'o.Deh ("I will praise," H3034) as ἐξομολογήσομαι ("I will confess/acknowledge"), and adds Νῦν ἔτι τοῦτο ("now, still this") not explicitly present as separate words in the Hebrew clause. The Vulgate's Quarto concepit ("she conceived a fourth time") makes explicit an ordinal count not stated by the Hebrew od ("again," H5750), which simply indicates repetition without specifying the number of the pregnancy.