Genesis 31:2

Summary

The verse states that Jacob perceived a change in Laban by observing his face: literally, Jacob "saw the face of Laban," and it was no longer with him "as yesterday, three days ago" — an idiom for "as before." The sentence marks a turning point in the narrative through visual perception followed by a negated state of being.

Key words

• vaYar ("he saw", H7200G) — qal verb with narrative vav, establishing the sequence of action: Jacob's act of looking precedes his realization.
• penei ("face of", H6440L) — masculine plural noun in construct state, linking directly to Laban; the construct chain "face of Laban" is the object of the seeing.
• hinneh ("there!", H2009) — interjection that shifts the narrative into Jacob's immediate perception, marking what he notices as he looks.
• eineNu ("not [was] he", H0369 + H9043) — construct noun functioning as a negator of existence, fused with a pronominal suffix ("his/him"), producing "he was not."
• ki-tMol shilShom ("as yesterday, three days ago", H8543 + H8032) — a fixed two-noun idiom used adverbially to express "as before" or "as formerly."

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative verb vaYar ("he saw", H7200G), placing Jacob as the grammatical subject who performs an act of seeing. The object of this seeing is introduced by the marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) followed by the construct phrase penei Laban — "the face of Laban" (H6440L + H3837A). In Biblical Hebrew, "seeing the face" of someone can denote direct visual perception of demeanor or expression, since panim (face) construct-linked to a person's name emphasizes what is visibly readable in that person.

The second clause is introduced by ve-hinneh ("and there!", H2009), a construction that often marks a shift into the subject's own point of view — here, what Jacob notices upon looking. This is followed by eineNu (H0369 + H9043), a construct negator-of-existence fused with a third-person masculine suffix, literally "there-is-not-of-him," meaning "he was not" in a given state. The prepositional phrase immo ("with him", H5973A + suffix) specifies the state: Laban was not "with him" (i.e., not in the same relational stance) as before. This whole predicate is qualified by the idiomatic time expression ki-tmol shilshom (H8543 + H8032), literally "as yesterday, three-days-ago," a standard idiom meaning "as previously" or "as before."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew construction eineNu immo ki-tmol shilshom ("he was not with him as yesterday, three days ago") is rendered periphrastically in the modern translations: BSB reads "his attitude toward him had changed," and SBLIBRE similarly states "la actitud de Labán hacia él ya no era la misma de antes" — both interpretive glosses rather than literal renderings of the idiom. The LXX (οὐκ ἦν πρὸς αὐτὸν ὡς ἐχθὲς καὶ τρίτην ἡμέραν) and the Vulgate (non esset erga se sicut heri et nudiustertius) follow the Hebrew idiom more closely, preserving the "yesterday and the day before" time expression rather than converting it into an abstract statement about "attitude."