Genesis 32:18

Summary

Jacob instructs his servant on what to say if Esau's men ask about the animals being driven ahead: he is to identify himself as belonging to "your servant Jacob," explain that the animals are a gift sent to "my lord Esau," and add that Jacob himself is following behind.

Key words

• 'a.mar.Ta ("you will say", H0559) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the chain of instructions Jacob gives his servant for the encounter with Esau's men.
• min.Chah ("gift", H4503H) — feminine singular noun naming the category of the animals being sent ahead.
• hi' ("it", H1931) — personal pronoun functioning as a copula, linking the noun min.Chah to the participle that follows, since Hebrew nominal clauses often lack an explicit verb "to be."
• she.lu.Chah ("sent", H7971G) — qal passive participle, feminine singular, agreeing with min.Chah; it describes the gift as sent without naming the sender within this specific clause.
• hi.Neh ("there!", H2009) — interjection drawing attention to the final statement, that "he" (the referent being the servant's subject, here understood as Jacob) is coming behind the group.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a script Jacob places in his servant's mouth. The double prepositional phrase le.'av.de.Kha... le.ya.'a.Ko ("to your servant... to Jacob," H5650 + H3290) uses apposition: the servant identifies himself first generically as "your servant," then specifically by name, "Jacob." The same pattern repeats for the recipient: la.'ado.Ni... le.'e.Sav ("to my lord... to Esau," H0113 + H6215G), naming Esau by title and then by name.

The core statement, min.Chah hi' she.lu.Chah ("a gift, it [is] sent"), has no finite verb "to be"; the pronoun hi' (H1931) supplies the copular link between subject and predicate, a common feature of Hebrew nominal clauses. The participle she.lu.Chah (H7971G) is passive, so grammatically the sender is not stated in this clause — the reader infers from context (the surrounding narrative) that Jacob is the one sending it.

The closing clause, ve.hi.Neh gam-hu' 'a.cha.Rei.nu ("and behold, also he [is] behind us"), uses the interjection hi.Neh (H2009) to mark a shift of attention, followed by the pronoun hu' ("he," H1931) whose antecedent is not made explicit by gender or number alone — it could refer back to the subject of the servant's speech, understood in context as Jacob.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders min.Chah (singular "gift") as δῶρα (plural "gifts"), and the Vulgate similarly uses munera (plural "gifts"), while the Hebrew has a singular noun. Both LXX (ἀπέσταλκεν, "he has sent") and Vulgate (misit, "he sent") use an active verb with an implied subject, whereas the Hebrew participle she.lu.Chah is passive and does not state the sender within the clause itself. The BSB translation explicitly supplies "Jacob is behind us," making the referent of the Hebrew pronoun hu' explicit, where the Hebrew and other versions (RV1909, SBLIBRE) leave it as an unspecified "he."