Genesis 31:10

Summary

Jacob recounts a dream that occurred at the time the flock was in heat: he lifted his eyes and saw that the male goats mounting the flock were striped, speckled, and mottled. The verse marks the shift into a first-person dream narrative introduced by the interjection hinneh ("there!", H2009).

Key words

• yaChem ("mated", H3179) — piel infinitive construct; the piel stem intensifies the root beyond simple "being warm," giving the sense of active mating/heat, and its construct form links it directly to tzon ("flock", H6629G) as "the mating-time of the flock."
• 'eSa ("I lifted up", H5375M) — qal narrative first-person verb, continuing the vav-consecutive chain that moves the story forward in first-person report.
• 'eynai ("my eyes", H5869A + H9020) — dual noun in construct with a pronominal suffix; the dual form reflects the paired body part, common in Hebrew for eyes.
• hinneh ("there!", H2009) — interjection marking the sudden, vivid content of the dream, shifting the narrative into direct visual description.
• 'akudim, nekudim, berudim ("striped", H6124; "speckled", H5348; "mottled", H1261) — three masculine plural adjectives stacked without conjunctions between the first two, describing the goats' coat pattern; only the last pair is joined by u ("and", H9002).

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula va-yehi ("and it was", H1961) followed by a temporal clause: be-'et yaChem ha-tzon ("at the time of the flock's mating"). This construct phrase uses the piel infinitive yaChem governed by the preposition be ("at", H9003), producing a compact time-marker without a finite verb of its own. The main narrative then resumes with two consecutive qal verbs in first person, 'eSa ("I lifted") and 'Ere' ("I saw", H7200G), both carrying the vav-consecutive that signals sequential past action — "I lifted... and I saw."

The content of the sight is introduced by hinneh, which in Biblical Hebrew often marks a scene as if viewed in real time by the speaker, here within the dream (ba-chalom, "in a dream", H2472). The subject is ha-'atudim ha-'olim 'al ha-tzon — "the male goats (H6260) that were going up on the flock" — using a participle ('olim, H5927K) with the definite article functioning as a relative clause ("which were going up"). The three coat-pattern adjectives ('akudim, nekudim, berudim) modify these goats, describing their appearance without a verb "to be," typical of Hebrew's ability to form full descriptive clauses through simple juxtaposition of noun and adjectives.

Differences between versions

The LXX names both τράγοι ("he-goats") and κριοὶ ("rams"), and adds τὰς αἶγας ("the female goats") as an object alongside τὰ πρόβατα ("the flocks"), where the Hebrew has only 'atudim ("male goats", H6260) acting upon ha-tzon ("the flock", H6629G) without distinguishing goats from sheep or specifying female animals. The Vulgate renders the participial clause 'olim 'al ha-tzon ("going up on the flock") more explicitly as "mares super feminas" ("males over females"), spelling out a sexual sense that the Hebrew participle leaves implicit through the verb "to go up." The Vulgate also converts the construct time-phrase be-'et yaChem ha-tzon into "tempus conceptus ovium" ("the time of the sheep's conception"), shifting the semantic focus from the piel verb's sense of heat/mating to the noun "conception."