Genesis 31:36

Summary

The verse narrates Jacob's angry reaction to Laban and records his direct speech, in which Jacob challenges Laban with two parallel rhetorical questions asking what wrongdoing justifies Laban's pursuit of him.

Key words

• va-yiChar ("it burned", H2734) — qal narrative verb; the idiom "it burned to Jacob" expresses anger, with Jacob as the indirect experiencer rather than the grammatical subject.
• va-yaRev ("he quarreled", H7378) — qal narrative verb continuing the sequence of actions ("and then he quarreled").
• pish'i ("my transgression", H6588 + H9020) — masculine singular noun in construct form with a 1st-person suffix ("transgression of me"), part of the first rhetorical question.
• chattati ("my sin", H2403B + H9020) — feminine singular noun in construct form with a 1st-person suffix, paired with pish'i in synonymous parallelism.
• dalaqta ("you have hotly pursued", H1814) — qal perfect, 2nd person masculine singular, denoting a completed action; introduced by ki ("that/if", H3588A), which links Jacob's questions to Laban's pursuit as its stated cause.

What the text says

The verse opens with a chain of four narrative verbs linked by the vav consecutive (H9001), each marked "and then...": va-yichar ("it burned"), va-yarev ("he quarreled"), va-ya'an ("he answered"), va-yomer ("he said"). This chain moves the narrative forward in rapid succession, culminating in the introduction of Jacob's direct speech. The first clause, va-yichar le-Ya'aqov ("it burned to Jacob"), uses an impersonal construction: the verb chara (H2734) has no explicit subject other than the anger itself, with Jacob appearing as the object of the preposition le ("to", H9005), a common Hebrew idiom for anger.

Jacob's speech consists of two parallel interrogatives built on the same pattern: mah ("what?", H4100) followed by a construct noun with a 1st-person suffix — mah pish'i ("what is my transgression") and mah chattati ("what is my sin"). Both pish'i (H6588) and chattati (H2403B) are construct-form nouns bound to the suffix -i ("my", H9020), a standard way in Hebrew to express possession without a separate possessive word. The parallelism between "transgression" and "sin" reinforces the rhetorical force of the question rather than introducing distinct legal categories.

The final clause is introduced by ki (H3588A), here functioning as "that," connecting the preceding questions to the stated action: dalaqta acharai ("you have hotly pursued after me"). The verb dalaqta (H1814) is in the qal perfect, marking it as a completed action from Jacob's perspective — Laban's pursuit is presented as an accomplished fact that Jacob demands justification for.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ki dalaqta acharai as hoti katediōxas opisō mou ("that you pursued after me"), a close structural match without intensifying the pursuit as "hotly." The Vulgate's sic exarsisti post me ("thus you have burned/flared up after me") uses a verb of burning (exarsisti) that echoes the opening idiom of anger (va-yichar) in the Hebrew narrative, though this echo is not present in the Hebrew verb dalaqta itself, which denotes pursuit rather than burning.