Genesis 31:11

Summary

Jacob recounts to his wives that in a dream mal'akh ha'Elohim ("the angel of God", H4397+H0430) called out to him, and he responded. The verse is structured as a report within Jacob's own speech, using narrative verb forms to mark the sequence of the divine call and his reply.

Key words

• mal'akh ("angel of", H4397) — masculine singular noun in construct state, requiring a following noun ("of God") to complete its meaning.
• ha-Elohim ("the God", H0430) — grammatically plural noun with the definite article, but functioning as a singular referent, as is standard in Biblical Hebrew for this term.
• chalom ("dream", H2472) — masculine singular noun, unmarked by a preposition of address before the name that follows it.
• Ya'akov ("Jacob") — proper name, positioned immediately after chalom with no connecting preposition, which produces the ambiguity discussed below.
• hinneni ("here I am", H2009 + suffix H9040) — interjection plus first-person pronominal suffix, a fixed formula of response indicating presence or readiness, used here as Jacob's reply.

What the text says

The verse uses two narrative (vav-consecutive) verb forms, va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) and va-omar ("and I said", H0559), which chain the report as a sequence of speech-acts: first the angel speaks, then Jacob replies. This chaining is typical of Hebrew narrative prose even when, as here, it occurs inside a first-person retelling.

The phrase ba-chalom Ya'akov ("in the dream, Jacob") places the proper name directly after the noun "dream" with no intervening preposition or verb of address. The Hebrew syntax does not explicitly mark this as a vocative call ("Jacob!"); the name simply follows the noun phrase. Translations that render it as the angel calling out "Jacob!" are supplying a vocative reading that the bare Hebrew word order does not grammatically require, though it is a common interpretive choice given the context of address.

Jacob's reply, hinneni, is a single word combining the interjection "behold/here" with a first-person suffix, functioning as a fixed idiom of response rather than a full sentence with a separate verb "to be."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the name doubled — Ἰακὼβ Ἰακώβ ("Jacob, Jacob") — where the Hebrew has the name only once. The Vulgate has a single "Jacob?" phrased as a question. Both differ from the Hebrew's single, non-vocative-marked Ya'akov.

A further divergence appears in Jacob's response: the Hebrew has hinneni ("here I am"), matched by the Vulgate's "Adsum" ("I am present"), but the LXX instead gives Τί ἐστιν; ("What is it?"), a different content of reply than "here I am."