Genesis 30:4

Summary

The verse narrates that a maidservant, Bilhah, is given by an unnamed female subject (grammatically marked only in the verb) to be a wife, after which Jacob has intercourse with her. The Hebrew text moves through two sequential narrative actions linked by the vav-consecutive construction.

Key words

• tiTten ("she gave", H5414G) — qal narrative verb; the feminine subject ("she") is encoded only in the verb form itself, with no separate pronoun or noun in this verse.
• shifchaTah ("her maidservant", H8198+H9024) — feminine singular noun in construct state with a pronominal suffix, literally "maidservant-of-her," marking Bilhah's subordinate status and possessive link to the unnamed "she."
• 'ishah ("a wife", H0802H) — feminine singular noun following the preposition le ("to/for"), forming the phrase "for a wife," indicating the purpose or resulting status of the giving.
• yaVo' ("he went/came", H0935G) — qal narrative verb, third person masculine; paired with the preposition 'el ("into/to") plus suffix, forms the idiom "he came to her."
• 'et- (H0853) — the direct object marker, syntactically flagging Bilhah as the object of the giving, though it carries no independent meaning in translation.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two vav-consecutive clauses, a standard narrative chain: va-tiTten ("and she gave") followed later by va-yyaVo' ("and he went/came"). The first clause has no explicit subject noun — the feminine verb form alone carries "she" — meaning the identity of the giver must be supplied from the surrounding narrative context, not from this verse's own words. The object Bilhah is marked by 'et- (H0853), and she is further specified as shifchaTah ("her maidservant," H8198+H9024), a construct-plus-suffix form that ties her status of servitude to the same unnamed "her" as the subject of tiTten. The prepositional phrase le-'ishah ("for/to a wife," H0802H) indicates the outcome of the giving — a change of status for Bilhah — rather than describing an ongoing action. The second clause, va-yyaVo' 'eleha yaakov ("and Jacob came to her," H0935G + H0413), uses a common idiom of approach into intimacy; the verb yaVo' itself simply means "to come/go," and its sexual sense here depends on the following preposition and context, not on the verb's inherent meaning.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew, LXX (ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ, "she gave to him"), and Vulgate (Dedit... illi, "she gave... to him") all leave the subject unexpressed as a separate noun, matching the grammatical structure of the Hebrew verb. The English (BSB) and Spanish (SBLIBRE, RV1909) versions supply the proper name "Rachel" explicitly as subject, which is not present as a distinct word in the Hebrew of this verse itself. The Vulgate renders le-'ishah ("for a wife") as in conjugium ("into marriage"), a slightly more abstract phrase than the Hebrew's concrete "for/to a wife."