Genesis 32:23

Summary

The verse narrates three sequential actions: someone took certain persons/objects, sent them across a wadi (stream), and then sent across everything that belonged to him. The Hebrew uses a bare relative construction rather than a specific noun for "his possessions."

Key words

• va-yiqqacheM — laqach ("he took", H3947G) + suffix -am ("them", H9038): qal verb in narrative sequence, marking the first action in the chain.
• va-ya'aviReM — avar ("he sent over/across", H5674A), hiphil (causative) form: the subject causes "them" to cross, not merely crosses himself.
• ha-Nachal — nachal ("wadi", H5158A) with definite article ha (H9009): a specific, known watercourse, the geographic point of crossing.
• asher — H0834A, relative particle ("that/which"): introduces a clause functioning as the object of the second avar.
• lo — preposition le + suffix -o ("to/for him", H9005+H9033): combined with asher, forms the idiom "that which [was] to him," i.e., what belonged to him.

What the text says

The verse is built on three narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs, each advancing the story in sequence: va-yiqqacheM ("and he took them"), va-ya'aviReM ("and he sent them across"), and va-ya'aVer ("and he sent across"). The first two verbs share the same object suffix -am ("them"), referring back to entities established earlier in the narrative context, while the third verb takes a different, more abstract object.

That third object is expressed not with a noun but with the relative clause asher-lo ("that which [was] to him" / "what belonged to him"). This construction — relative particle asher plus the preposition le ("to/for") with a pronominal suffix — is a common Biblical Hebrew way of expressing possession without a possessive noun: literally "that which [is] to him" functions as "his belongings." The grammar does not specify what these belongings consist of; the phrase is deliberately general.

The repetition of the hiphil verb avar ("to cause to cross," H5674A) across two clauses (verses 5 and 11 in the word list) emphasizes two distinct acts of crossing — first "them," then "what was his" — treated as separate groups moved over the wadi.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the final phrase as διεπάντα τὰ αὐτοῦ ("he brought across all his things"), inserting πάντα ("all"), an explicit quantifier not present in the Hebrew asher-lo. The Vulgate restructures the clause as an ablative absolute, "Traductisque omnibus quæ ad se pertinebant" ("all things pertaining to him having been brought across"), syntactically subordinating this action rather than presenting it as a third parallel main verb, as the Hebrew's vav-consecutive chain does.