Genesis 30:40

Summary

The verse describes Jacob's selective breeding practice: he separated out lambs, then oriented the rest of the flock toward the streaked and dark-colored animals in Laban's flock, and finally set his own flocks apart, keeping them distinct from Laban's.

Key words

• hifRid ("he separated", H6504) — hiphil perfect, a causative form: Jacob does not merely separate himself but causes the lambs to be divided out, marking a deliberate, engineered action.
• peney ("faces of", H6440) — masculine plural construct of "face," here used idiomatically with the flock; the construct chain "peney hatson" ("the faces of the flock") produces the difficult phrase "he set the faces of the flock toward..."
• 'aKod ("striped", H6124) — masculine singular adjective describing the marked animals Jacob orients the flock toward.
• chum ("dark [one]", H2345) — masculine singular adjective, paired with kol ("every", H3605) in construct, giving "every dark one."
• levaDo ("for himself alone", from H0905 + suffix) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, emphasizing exclusivity: the flocks are set apart specifically and only for Jacob.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence moves through three narrative actions linked by the narrative vav (marked H9001 on vayyiten and vayyashet): first a perfect-tense action (hifRid, "he separated"), then two consecutive narrative verbs (vayyiten, "and he set"; vayyashet, "and he made/set"). This chain presents the events as a sequence: separation, orientation, and establishment of Jacob's own flocks. The phrase vayyiten peney hatson 'el-'aqod ("he set the faces of the flock toward the striped") uses "face" idiomatically to describe direction or orientation, a construction that does not translate literally into English without paraphrase. The final clause negates any mixing with Laban's flock (lo' shatam 'al-tson Lavan, "he did not put them with Laban's flock"), using the same verb root shatam ("he put them", H7896) as the prior clause vayyashet, reinforcing the contrast between what Jacob did for himself and what he refrained from doing regarding Laban's animals.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate diverges substantially from the Hebrew here: "posuit virgas in canalibus ante oculos arietum" ("he placed rods in the channels before the eyes of the rams") introduces imagery of rods and channels that belongs to the preceding verses (Gen 30:37–38) rather than to the Hebrew text of this verse, which contains no reference to rods (maqqal) or channels (rahat). The LXX also adds a term not present in the Hebrew, "κριὸν διάλευκον" ("a partly white ram"), where the Hebrew simply has 'aqod ("striped") modifying the flock generally, without specifying a ram.