Genesis 30:5

Summary

Genesis 30:5 reports in narrative sequence that Bilhah conceived and bore a son to Jacob. The verse uses two short, consecutive verbs to mark the action as a direct continuation of the preceding narrative.

Key words

• va.Tahar ("she conceived", H2029) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive + prefix conjugation); marks the first event in the sequence, "and then she conceived."
• bilHah ("Bilhah", H1090A) — proper noun, feminine, the subject of both verbs in the verse.
• va.Teled ("she bore", H3205) — qal narrative form, parallel in structure to va.Tahar; marks the second event, "and then she bore."
• le. ("to", H9005) — preposition attached to ya.'aKo ("Jacob", H3290), indicating the one to whom the son is born.
• Ben ("a son", H1121A) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of va.Teled, unmodified by any numeral or adjective beyond "a."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — va.Tahar ("she conceived") and va.Teled ("she bore") — both in the qal simple stem with Bilhah as the implied and then stated subject. This chain construction ("and she conceived... and she bore...") is typical of Hebrew narrative sequence, presenting the two actions as a continuous, sequential unit rather than as separate or emphasized events. The proper name bilHah (H1090A) appears once, right after the first verb, establishing her as subject for both verbs that follow.

The phrase le.ya.'aKo ("to Jacob") uses the preposition le. (H9005) to mark Jacob as the recipient or beneficiary of the birth, a common Hebrew construction for expressing "bore to" a father. The object Ben ("a son", H1121A) is a plain masculine singular noun without further qualification, simply indicating the sex of the child born, paralleling other birth notices in the surrounding narrative of Genesis 30.

Differences between versions

The LXX adds a descriptive phrase not present in the Hebrew: it renders Bilhah as Βάλλα ἡ παιδίσκη Ῥαχήλ ("Balla, the maidservant of Rachel"), specifying her status and mistress, information absent from the Hebrew text at this verse. The Vulgate (VULCLEM) further diverges by adding ingresso ad se viro ("the man having gone in to her"), a clause not present in the Hebrew or the LXX at this point, which supplies additional narrative detail about the conception. The Hebrew text itself contains neither of these expansions, stating only the two bare verbs of conceiving and bearing.