Genesis 31:34

Summary

The verse narrates that Rachel had taken the household teraphim, hidden them in her camel's saddlebag, and sat on them, while Laban searched the entire tent without finding them.

Key words

• teRafim ("teraphim", H8655) — masculine plural noun with definite article, referring to household objects Rachel took; the term itself is left untranslated in the Hebrew narrative, simply naming the objects.
• lakeChah ("she had taken", H3947G) — qal perfect, 3rd feminine singular. The perfect aspect here marks an action already completed before the main narrative line resumes, functioning as background information (Rachel's prior action) rather than the next event in sequence.
• va-teshev ("and she sat", H3427) — qal narrative form (vav + prefix conjugation), continuing the story's main sequence: after hiding the teraphim, she then sits on them.
• yemaShesh ("he searched", H4959) — piel narrative form. The piel stem intensifies the action compared to a simple qal verb, conveying a thorough, careful physical search (a groping or feeling through the tent's contents) rather than a casual look.
• matza ("he found", H4672) — qal perfect, negated by lo ("not", H3808), stating the completed absence of result: the search concluded without success.

What the text says

The sentence structure separates background from foreground action. The clause ve-Rachel lakechah et-ha-terafim ("and Rachel had taken the teraphim") uses the perfect verb form lakechah to present an action that occurred prior to the main narrative thread — Rachel's taking of the teraphim is assumed already done as the scene opens. The narrative then shifts to the sequential vav-forms va-tesime ("and she put them", H7760H), va-teshev ("and she sat"), and va-yemashesh ("and he searched"), which carry the story forward in chronological sequence: placing the objects in the camel's saddlebag (be-khar ha-gamal, "in the saddlebag of the camel"), sitting upon them, and Laban's subsequent search.

The verb yemashesh, in the piel stem, describes an intensive manual search — a groping through the tent's contents — contrasting with a simple visual inspection. The object of this search is marked as kol-ha-'ohel ("all the tent", using the construct kol, H3605), indicating a comprehensive search of the entire tent structure. The final clause, ve-lo matza ("and he did not find"), uses the qal perfect with negation to state the search's completed and unsuccessful outcome, without specifying what exactly was not found — the antecedent (the teraphim) is understood from context rather than repeated grammatically.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) renders terafim as idola ("idols"), an interpretive gloss not present in the Hebrew term itself, which simply names the objects as teraphim without inherent evaluative content. The Vulgate also adds festinans ("hurrying"), a detail describing manner that has no corresponding word in the Hebrew text provided.