Genesis 31:43

Summary

Laban responds to Jacob by asserting a claim over his daughters, grandchildren, and flocks, using a series of parallel possessive statements. He then poses a rhetorical question asking what he can actually do at this point, given that the daughters and children in question are already his.

Key words

• bèNot / benoTai ("daughters" / "daughters of me", H1323G) — the noun appears twice in construct-like repetition: first with the definite article (ha-banot, "the daughters"), then in construct form with the 1st-person suffix (benotai, "daughters-of-me"). This doubling creates the emphatic pattern "the daughters — my daughters."
• baNim / baNai ("children" / "children of me", H1121A) — same doubling pattern as above, applied to sons.
• tzon / tzoNi ("flock" / "flock of me", H6629G) — same construction repeated a third time for the livestock.
• ro'Eh ("[one] seeing", H7200G) — a qal participle, denoting an ongoing state ("that which you are seeing") rather than a single completed act of sight.
• e'eSeh ("I will do", H6213A) — qal imperfect, marking unresolved or future-oriented action, fitting the rhetorical question "what can/will I do."

What the text says

The verse is built on a triple repetition of the same syntactic pattern: a noun with the definite article (ha-banot, ha-banim, ha-tzon — "the daughters," "the sons," "the flock") is immediately followed by the same noun in construct form with the 1st-person suffix (benotai, banai, tzoni — "daughters-of-me," "sons-of-me," "flock-of-me"). This creates a rhythmic assertion: "the daughters, my daughters; and the sons, my sons; and the flock, my flock." The construction places emphasis through repetition rather than through additional verbs — Hebrew here uses no copula ("are"), so the possessive claim is stated as pure juxtaposition.

This is followed by a general clause, kol asher-atah ro'eh li-hu ("all that you are seeing, it is to me/mine"), using the participle ro'eh to describe Jacob's ongoing visual perception of the property, and the pronoun hu ("it/he") to close the identification.

The final section shifts to a rhetorical question introduced by mah ("what?", H4100): mah-e'eseh la-eleh ha-yom ("what will I do for these, today"). The imperfect verb e'eseh leaves the action open — neither a command nor a statement of fact, but a question implying limited options. The clause is doubled with o li-vnei-hen asher yaladu ("or for the sons-of-them whom they have borne"), where yaladu is a qal perfect, marking the bearing of children as a completed past action, contrasted with the open, unresolved present question of what Laban can now do.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew repeats each noun twice (article + construct-suffix form) for daughters, sons, and flock, producing an emphatic doubling not directly reproduced in the LXX or Vulgate. The LXX (Greek) renders this with possessive adjectives (σου / μου, "yours" / "mine") rather than repeating the bare nouns, and adds an explicit copula (ἐστιν, "is") for the general clause about "all that you see," which is not an independent verb in the Hebrew. The Vulgate compresses further, rendering banai and benei-hen together as "filiis et nepotibus meis" ("my sons and grandsons"), collapsing the Hebrew's distinct final clause ("or the sons whom they have borne") into a single phrase, and omitting the separate qal perfect yaladu ("they have borne") as its own verb.