Genesis 32:7

Summary

The verse reports three sequential actions of Jacob: he became greatly afraid, something like distress came upon him, and he then divided the people, flocks, herds, and camels traveling with him into two camps. The Hebrew presents these as a chain of narrative events rather than a single description of an emotional state followed by an action.

Key words

• va-yiyra' ("and he was afraid", H3372G) — qal narrative verb, first link in the vav-consecutive chain that opens the verse.
• va-yetzer ("and it was distress", H3334) — qal narrative verb, grammatically impersonal ("it distressed"), not "he felt distress" directly.
• lo ("to him", H9033 pronominal suffix attached to H9005) — dative construction receiving the action of yetzer, showing the distress as happening to Jacob rather than being an inner state he generates.
• va-yachatz ("and he divided", H2673) — qal narrative verb, third and final link in the chain, the concrete action resulting from the prior two states.
• li-shnei machanot ("into two of camps", H8147 construct + H4264) — construct numeral governing a plural feminine noun, specifying the division into exactly two groups.

What the text says

The verse is built on three consecutive vav-consecutive (narrative) verbs — va-yiyra', va-yetzer, va-yachatz — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which chains events in sequence: fear happened, then distress happened, then Jacob acted by dividing. The second verb, yetzer (H3334), is not built with Jacob as active subject feeling something; grammatically it is impersonal, and Jacob appears only as the indirect object via the preposition-plus-suffix lo ("to him"). This differs from constructions where a person is the grammatical subject of an emotion-verb; here the emotion is presented as an event that occurs to Jacob.

The object of division lists four groups, each marked with the object marker 'et (H0853) — ha-'am ("the people"), ha-tzon ("the flock"), ha-baqar ("the herd") — except the final item, ha-gemalim ("the camels"), which is joined only by the conjunction ve- (H9002) without a repeated 'et. This shift in marking sets the camels apart syntactically from the first three items, though all four remain objects of the same verb va-yachatz.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) renders the division clause as covering only τὸν λαὸν ("the people"), τοὺς βόας ("the oxen"), and τὰ πρόβατα ("the sheep") — camels are absent from this clause in the Greek text, though the Hebrew includes ha-gemalim ("the camels", H1581) among the divided groups. The Vulgate (Clementine), by contrast, includes "camelos" ("camels") alongside "greges," "oves," and "boves," matching the fourfold Hebrew list. The BSB compresses the Hebrew's three sequential verbs (yiyra', yetzer, yachatz) into a single English clause ("In great fear and distress, Jacob divided..."), representing the first two narrative actions as a prepositional phrase rather than as separate sequential events.