Genesis 31:28

Summary

Laban reproaches Jacob for departing secretly, saying that Jacob did not allow him the customary farewell kiss for his sons and daughters, and calls this act foolish. The verse uses two parallel "verb + infinitive" constructions to express what Jacob failed to do and what he did instead.

Key words

• netashtani ("did you allow? / you did not let me", H5203) — qal perfect 2ms with 1cs suffix "me"; the perfect marks a completed, definite action, and the attached pronoun makes Laban the object of Jacob's omission.
• nashek ("to kiss", H5401A) — piel infinitive; the piel form intensifies the action (a full, proper kissing/greeting), governed by the preposition le ("to"), forming the complement of netashtani.
• vanai ("sons of me", H1121G) — masculine plural noun in construct with the 1cs suffix -i ("my"), naming the object of the missed farewell.
• venotai ("and daughters of me", H1323G) — feminine plural construct parallel to vanai, joined by ve ("and"), completing the merism "sons and daughters."
• hiskalta ("you have behaved foolishly", H5528) — hiphil perfect 2ms; the causative stem frames the action as one Jacob himself brought about, paired with aso ("to do", H6213A), a qal infinitive functioning as a complement — "you have done foolishly in doing [this]."

What the text says

The sentence divides into two clauses joined by atah ("now", H6258), which marks a shift from what Jacob failed to do to Laban's judgment on the whole affair. In the first clause, netashtani ("you did not allow me") takes as its complement the infinitive construction le-nashek le-vanai ve-livnotai — literally "to kiss, to my sons and to my daughters" — where the preposition le is repeated before both "sons" and "daughters," a common Hebrew way of marking the indirect object of the infinitive rather than a direct object. The construct forms vanai and venotai bind the nouns tightly to the possessive suffix "my," identifying these children as Laban's own.

The second clause repeats the same infinitive pattern: hiskalta asso ("you have behaved foolishly in doing"), where the hiphil perfect hiskalta states the foolish disposition as a completed fact, and the qal infinitive asso specifies the action to which that foolishness applies — Jacob's manner of leaving.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew vanai ("my sons") is rendered by the LXX as ta paidia mou ("my children"), a more general term than the specific "sons," while the Vulgate keeps filios meos ("my sons"), matching the Hebrow more closely. Some modern translations (BSB, SBLIBRE) render vanai as "grandchildren/nietos," an interpretive expansion not present as a distinct lexical item in the Hebrew text, which simply reads "my sons."