Genesis 32:14

Summary

The verse lists part of the livestock gift Jacob prepares to send ahead to Esau: two hundred female goats, twenty male goats, two hundred ewes, and twenty rams. It consists purely of paired nouns and numbers, with no verb, forming an inventory list.

Key words

• 'i.Zim ("female goats", H5795) — masculine plural noun (the term for female goats is grammatically masculine in this plural form), first item of the list.
• ma.Ta.yim ("two hundred", H3967) — feminine dual form, used here as the standard way to express "two hundred" regardless of the gender of the counted noun.
• te.ya.Shim ("male goats", H8495) — masculine plural, joined to the previous clause by the conjunction u- ("and", H9002), forming the second animal pair.
• re.che.Lim ("ewes", H7353) — masculine plural noun despite denoting female animals, echoing the same grammatical pattern as 'i.Zim.
• 'es.Rim ("twenty", H6242) — masculine plural cardinal number, repeated twice to close each two-item unit (goats/twenty, rams/twenty).

What the text says

The verse has no finite verb; it is a construct of four noun-number pairs, each pair naming an animal type followed immediately by its quantity: 'i.Zim + ma.Ta.yim ("female goats, two hundred"), te.ya.Shim + 'es.Rim ("male goats, twenty"), re.che.Lim + ma.Ta.yim ("ewes, two hundred"), 'ei.Lim + 'es.Rim ("rams, twenty"). The conjunction u-/ve- ("and", H9002) appears only before the second and fourth items (te.ya.Shim and 'ei.Lim), linking each male-animal term to the female term that precedes it, so the list reads as two coordinated units — "goats and he-goats" and "ewes and rams" — rather than four separate items joined by "and" throughout.

Grammatically, the numeral ma.Ta.yim ("two hundred", H3967) is a feminine dual form, and 'es.Rim ("twenty", H6242) is masculine plural; Hebrew numerals do not always match the grammatical gender of the noun they count, so the form of the number here follows its own pattern rather than agreeing with the animal terms, which are themselves grammatically masculine plural nouns even where they denote female animals ('i.Zim, re.che.Lim).

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) and Vulgate follow the same four-pair structure and numeral values as the Hebrew, rendering 'i.Zim as aigas / capras, te.ya.Shim as an unspecified plural (implied "twenty" without a repeated noun in the Greek) / hircos, re.che.Lim as probata / oves, and 'ei.Lim as krious / arietes. No numeral or animal-category divergence appears in the data provided; the structure of paired noun-number units is preserved across the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts.