Genesis 31:37

Summary

Jacob challenges Laban to produce any object from Jacob's possessions that actually belongs to Laban's household, after Laban has searched everything. Jacob instructs that whatever is found be placed before the assembled kinsmen of both parties, so that these witnesses may render a judgment between the two of them.

Key words

• mishashta ("you have searched", H4959) — piel perfect, an intensive stem indicating a thorough, exhaustive search, not a casual one.
• matzata ("did you find", H4672) — qal perfect (simple stem), describing the plain result of that search, contrasting with the intensified verb used for the searching itself.
• sim ("put", H7760A) — qal imperative, a direct command addressed to Laban.
• yokhichu ("they may decide", H3198) — hiphil imperfect with vav, a causative form (literally "cause to prove/decide"), introduced with vav to express purpose or result ("so that they may judge/prove").
• achai / acheikha ("my relatives" / "your relatives", H0251H) — masculine plural construct nouns with pronominal suffixes, referring to kin-group members present as witnesses, not necessarily literal brothers.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the conditional/subordinating particle ki ("that"/"if", H3588A), linking this statement to Jacob's preceding remarks. The verb pair mishashta (piel, intensive "searched thoroughly") and matzata (qal, plain "found") creates a grammatical contrast: the searching is marked as exhaustive while the finding is stated in the simple stem, which underscores that despite the intensive effort, the result is presented as a bare fact for Laban to answer. Two parallel construct chains — kol kelai ("all of my things") and mikkol kelei veitekha ("from all the things of your house") — frame the question "what did you find, out of all the things of your house?", built around the interrogative mah ("what?", H4100).

The imperative sim ("put") is followed by the adverb koh ("thus/here", H3541) and the preposition neged ("before", H5048), placing the object physically in front of the two groups of achai and acheikha. The clause closes with ve-yokhichu, a hiphil form joined by vav, expressing the purpose of this public placement: that the assembled kin may "cause a decision" — the causative sense of the verb — between the pair, marked by the dual-oriented construct bein shenenu ("between the two of us").

Differences between versions

The Hebrew order is achai ve-acheikha ("my relatives and your relatives"), and the Vulgate matches this sequence (fratribus meis, et fratribus tuis). The LXX reverses the order, rendering "τῶν ἀδελφῶν σου καὶ τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου" ("your brothers and my brothers"). Both LXX and Vulgate render achai/acheikha with words meaning "brothers" specifically, where the Hebrew term denotes broader kinship relations.