Genesis 30:22

Summary

The verse narrates three consecutive divine actions toward Rachel: God remembers her, listens to her, and opens her womb. The Hebrew presents these as a tightly sequenced chain of narrative verbs, each introduced by the same connective structure, culminating in the notice of physical fertility.

Key words

• yizkor ("he remembered", H2142) — qal narrative verb; the vav-prefixed form marks the first event in the sequence, establishing God as the acting subject.
• Elohim ("God", H0430G) — masculine plural noun (grammatically plural, but functioning as the singular subject "God" in this construction); it appears twice in the verse, once as subject of "remembered" and again as subject of "listened."
• yishma ("he listened", H8085G) — qal narrative verb, second link in the chain, governing the prepositional phrase "to her."
• yiftach ("he opened", H6605A) — qal narrative verb, third and final link, introducing the direct object "her womb."
• rachmah ("womb", H7358) — masculine singular noun in construct form with the pronominal suffix -ah ("her"), meaning "her womb"; construct state ties it directly to the possessive suffix.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as three successive narrative clauses, each beginning with the vav-consecutive prefix (va-) attached to a verb in the same narrative aspect. This produces a rapid sequence: "and he remembered... and he listened... and he opened..." The repeated use of Elohim as subject in both the first and second clauses (rather than a pronoun) gives emphasis to divine agency at each stage, rather than treating the actions as a single continuous act with one subject mentioned only once.

The object of the first verb, Rachel (H7354), is marked with the direct object particle 'et (H0853), which itself carries no independent meaning but signals that Rachel is the direct object of "remembered." The second verb, "he listened," takes a prepositional object — "to her" ('eleiha, built from H0413 + the suffix H9034) — rather than a direct object, reflecting a different verbal construction than the first and third clauses. The third clause returns to a direct-object construction, marked again by 'et, with "her womb" (rachmah) as the object of "he opened." The construct form of rachmah with the pronominal suffix ties the noun grammatically and semantically to Rachel without repeating her name.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the subject as Dominus ("the Lord") in the first clause, where the Hebrew has Elohim ("God", H0430G); the Septuagint (ὁ θεός) and Hebrew agree in using "God" throughout, including its second occurrence in "he listened." The Vulgate also does not repeat the divine name before "exaudivit eam" ("he listened to her"), collapsing what the Hebrew and LXX present as two parallel statements each naming Elohim/ὁ θεός as subject. The Spanish SBLIBRE paraphrases the third clause ("le concedió tener hijos", "he granted her to have children") rather than translating the Hebrew's literal image of "opening the womb" (yiftach... rachmah), which the BSV, RV1909, LXX, and Vulgate all render more literally as opening/removing the barrenness of the womb.