Genesis 31:25

Summary

The verse describes Laban catching up with Jacob after the earlier flight, then notes the geographic setting: Jacob had already set up camp in the hill country, and Laban's group camped nearby in the same region, called here "the hill country of Gilead."

Key words

• ya.Seg ("he overtook", H5381) — hiphil (causative) verb with narrative vav, marking the main storyline action: Laban's pursuit reaches its goal.
• ta.Ka' ("he had pitched", H8628) — qal perfect, first occurrence, describing Jacob's tent-pitching; introduced by simple ve rather than narrative vav, which shifts the clause from sequential action to background/anterior information.
• ta.Ka' ("he pitched tent", H8628) — the same verb form reused for Laban, but here without a stated object noun for "tent"; the object is left implicit.
• 'et ("with", H0854) — a preposition (distinct from the object marker 'et, H0853, used earlier in the verse), introducing "his relatives" as an accompaniment rather than as a direct object of the verb.
• 'o.ho.L...o ("his tent", H0168G + suffix) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, giving Jacob's action a concrete direct object that Laban's parallel clause lacks.

What the text says

The verse opens with a wayyiqtol form, ya.Seg ("he overtook", H5381), which carries the narrative forward: this is the main event. The two following clauses about tent-pitching are introduced with ve + perfect (ta.Ka', H8628) rather than the narrative vav, a grammatical signal that these describe a state of affairs already in place — hence English versions like the BSB render the first occurrence as a pluperfect ("had pitched"), even though Hebrew tense-aspect morphology alone does not encode past-perfect meaning; the disjunctive syntax does.

A further nuance lies in the asymmetry between the two ta.Ka' clauses. For Jacob, the verb takes an explicit object, 'o.ho.L...o ("his tent", H0168G), marked by the accusative particle 'et (H0853). For Laban, the same verb appears but its complement, 'e.Cha ("relatives", H0251H) with suffix "his," is introduced by 'et as a preposition of accompaniment (H0854), not the object marker. The Hebrew therefore does not state directly that Laban pitched a tent; it says he "pitched [tented] with his relatives," leaving the object of the verb to be inferred from the parallel clause about Jacob.

Differences between versions

The LXX uses two different verbs for the two subjects: ἔπηξεν ("pitched," for Jacob's tent) versus ἔστησεν ("stationed/set up," for Laban's relatives), reflecting the Hebrew's lack of an explicit tent-object for Laban. The Vulgate, by contrast, supplies "tentorium" ("a tent") explicitly for Laban's action ("fixit tentorium"), making explicit what the Hebrew leaves implicit through the shared verb and ellipsis.