Genesis 30:17

Summary

The verse reports that God responded favorably to Leah, who then conceived and gave birth to a fifth son for Jacob. The Hebrew narrative uses a chain of sequential verbs to mark this as the next event following the surrounding mandrake episode.

Key words

• va-yishma' ("he listened", H8085G) — qal narrative verb (wayyiqtol), placing God's act of listening as the first event in the sequence.
• Elohim ("God", H0430G) — masculine plural noun functioning as the subject; the grammatical plural does not indicate multiple deities but is the standard form used for the God of Israel.
• va-tahar ("she conceived", H2029) — qal narrative verb, second link in the chain, subject "she" (Leah).
• va-teled ("she bore", H3205) — qal narrative verb, third link, completing the sequence of divine response → conception → birth.
• ben chamishi ("a son", H1121A + "fifth", H2549) — noun with ordinal number, marking this birth as the fifth in the count of Jacob's sons through this narrative.

What the text says

The verse is built from four consecutive verbs joined by the narrative vav (H9001): va-yishma', va-tahar, va-teled, each introducing the next stage of the action. This chain structure presents the events as a direct temporal and causal sequence — God's listening precedes and leads into Leah's conception and delivery — without needing an explicit connector like "therefore" or "because." The verb yishma' (H8085G) is followed by the preposition 'el (H0413) plus Leah (H3812), literally "he listened to Leah," rather than "he listened to her voice" or "her prayer," which are alternative constructions found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The final phrase, ben chamishi ("fifth son"), uses an ordinal adjective directly modifying ben ("son", H1121A), simply numbering this birth within the series of Jacob's sons rather than naming the child within this verse itself.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the object of God's listening as preces ejus ("her prayers"), an interpretive addition not present in the Hebrew, which states only that God listened 'el-Leah ("to Leah") without specifying prayer as the content. The LXX similarly shifts the object to a pronoun, epēkousen autēs ("he heard her"), rather than repeating the proper name Leah as the Hebrew does. The LXX also compresses the two Hebrew verbs va-tahar ("she conceived") and va-teled ("she bore") into a participial construction, syllabousa eteken ("having conceived, she bore"), differing from the Hebrew's two independent sequential verbs.