Genesis 30:32

Summary

Jacob proposes to Laban the terms of his wages: he will go through Laban's flock and set aside every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark lamb, and every spotted or speckled goat. These separated animals will then constitute his payment.

Key words

• 'e'evor ("let me pass", H5674A) — qal imperfect, first person, expressing Jacob's proposed future action of going through the flock.
• hasser ("I will remove", H5493G) — hiphil infinitive absolute; this form does not carry its own subject or tense but intensifies or reinforces the preceding finite verb, functioning here as a coordinated action ("passing through... removing").
• taluʼ ("spotted", H2921) — qal passive participle, describing an animal marked by a passive/resultant condition (having been spotted), repeated twice in the verse for both sheep and goats.
• naqod ("speckled", H5348) — adjective, paired consistently with taluʼ to form a fixed two-term description of coat pattern.
• sekhari ("my wage", H7939 + H9020) — noun in construct form with a first-person pronominal suffix, closing the verse by naming these animals as the compensation itself.

What the text says

The verse opens with 'e'evor ("let me pass", H5674A), a first-person qal imperfect, establishing Jacob as the grammatical subject of the entire proposal. This is followed by hasser ("I will remove", H5493G), a hiphil infinitive absolute — a form that in Biblical Hebrew typically reinforces a nearby finite verb rather than standing as an independent clause. Here it extends the action of "passing through" into "removing," so the two verbs together describe a single continuous action: walking through the flock while separating out specific animals.

The list of animals is built through repeated construct chains using kol ("all/every", H3605), each governing a type of sheep (seh, H7716) or its coat pattern (naqod "speckled", H5348; taluʼ "spotted", H2921; chum "dark", H2345). The pairing of taluʼ and naqod appears twice, once for lambs (kesavim, H3775) and once for goats ('izim, H5795), with the order of the two terms reversed between the two groups in the Hebrew.

The verse closes with the narrative vav attached to hayah ("it will be", H1961), a sequential perfect that logically completes the conditional proposal, followed by sekhari ("my wage", H7939 with suffix H9020), a construct noun phrase meaning literally "wage of me."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew has Jacob as the subject ("I will pass through," 'e'evor), while the LXX renders this as a third-person imperative addressed to the sheep themselves — "παρελθάτω τὰ πρόβατά σου" ("let your sheep pass"). The Vulgate similarly shifts the grammatical subject, using the second-person imperative "Gyra" ("go around/circle"), addressed to Laban rather than describing Jacob's own action. The LXX also renders chum ("dark", H2345) as φαιὸν ("gray/dusky") and uses λευκὸν ("white") for the goats' naqod ("speckled", H5348), diverging from the Hebrew's consistent color terms applied to both sheep and goats.