Genesis 31:22

Summary

The verse reports that on the third day after Jacob's departure, Laban received the news that Jacob had fled. The Hebrew sentence uses a passive construction to describe how the information reached Laban, followed by a subordinate clause stating the content of what was reported.

Key words

• yugad ("it was told", H5046) — hophal (causative-passive) form; indicates that the report reached Laban without naming who delivered it.
• Lavan ("Laban", H3837A) — proper name, marked with the preposition le ("to"), indicating the recipient of the news.
• bayyom ("on the day", H3117G) — noun with prefixed preposition ba ("in/on") and article, forming a time marker for when the report occurred.
• ki ("that", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the content of what was told to Laban.
• barach ("he had fled", H1272) — qal perfect, denoting a completed action prior to the moment of reporting; describes Jacob's departure as already accomplished.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative va prefix attached to yugad, a hophal form of the root meaning "to tell" or "to declare." The hophal stem is passive and causative in force, meaning the subject (the news) is caused to be told, but the agent doing the telling is not specified. This grammatical choice keeps the focus on Laban as recipient (le-Lavan, "to Laban") rather than on whoever informed him.

The time phrase bayyom hashelishi ("on the third day") uses the article ha with the ordinal shelishi ("third", H7992), fixing the moment of the report within the narrative timeline — three days after the event being reported.

The particle ki introduces the reported content as a subordinate clause: "that Jacob had fled." The verb barach is in the qal perfect, a simple active form denoting a completed action. Grammatically, this creates a temporal layering: the fleeing (barach, perfect) had already been completed before the telling (yugad, passive) took place — the report describes an event already in the past relative to Laban's discovery of it.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders "to Laban" as "Λαβὰν τῷ Σύρῳ" ("to Laban the Syrian"), adding an ethnic designation not present in the Hebrew text, which reads simply le-Lavan. The Vulgate ("nuntiatum est Laban") and the Hebrew both lack this addition, following the shorter form. The LXX also uses ἀπέδρα ("ran away," aorist) for barach, a lexical choice distinct from but semantically close to the Hebrew "fled."