Genesis 32:12

Summary

Jacob recalls to God, in prayer, a divine promise: that God would act well toward him and would multiply his descendants like the sand of the sea, too numerous to be counted. The verse quotes back God's own words as reported speech within Jacob's petition.

Key words

• heitev ("certainly ", H3190) — hiphil absolute infinitive, placed before the finite verb to intensify it; it does not carry its own subject or tense but reinforces the verb that follows.
• eitiv ("I will do good", H3190) — hiphil imperfect, first person; together with heitev forms the classic Hebrew emphatic pattern "infinitive absolute + finite verb of the same root," expressing certainty ("I will surely do good").
• sam'ti ("I will make", H7760A) — qal perfect with vav-consecutive (sequential perfect); though morphologically perfect ("I have made"), the vav-conjunction chains it to the preceding imperfect eitiv, so it continues the future sense ("and I will make").
• zar'akha ("your offspring", H2233H) — masculine singular noun in construct state, bound to the pronominal suffix -kha ("your"); construct form links it directly to what follows syntactically.
• yissafer ("it will be counted", H5608A) — niphal imperfect, passive voice; the offspring is the implied subject of an action done to it (counting), rather than an action it performs.

What the text says

The verse opens with the independent pronoun 'atah ("you", H0859A) placed before the verb 'amarta ("you have said", H0559), which in Hebrew syntax gives emphasis to the addressee — "you [yourself] said." This sets up the quoted speech that follows, attributed to God, which Jacob recites back in his prayer.

The core of the quoted promise uses the infinitive absolute construction heitev 'eitiv — literally "to do good, I will do good" — a grammatical device in which the infinitive absolute (H3190) precedes the finite hiphil imperfect of the same root, intensifying the certainty of the action beyond what a single verb would convey. This is followed by ve-sam'ti ("and I will make"), a perfect verb form joined by the narrative vav-consecutive; despite its perfect morphology, this construction continues the future-oriented sense of the preceding imperfect, a common feature of Biblical Hebrew verbal sequencing where perfect and imperfect alternate to carry forward a single temporal thread.

The comparison "like the sand of the sea" uses two nouns in construct chains: chol ha-yam ("sand of the sea", H2344 + H3220G) modified by the relative clause 'asher lo-yissafer me-rov ("which will not be counted from multitude"). The verb yissafer is niphal (passive-reflexive), meaning the sand is not performing the counting but is the object of an uncountable action — grammatically marking the impossibility of enumeration as inherent to the noun's state rather than as an external limitation.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the promise as benefaceres mihi ("you would do good to me"), explicitly supplying "to me," whereas the Hebrew 'eitiv 'immakh uses the preposition 'im ("with", H5973A) plus suffix, meaning literally "I will do good with you." The LXX's καλῶς εὖ σε ποιήσω ("well, good I will do to you") similarly doubles vocabulary to approximate the Hebrew infinitive-absolute emphasis, though using two distinct Greek adverbs rather than repeating a single verbal root as the Hebrew does.