Genesis 33:4

Summary

Genesis 33:4 describes Esau running to meet Jacob, embracing him, falling on his neck, kissing him, and both weeping. The verse is built as a rapid chain of five consecutive narrative verbs, all governed by the vav-prefixed form that marks sequential action in Biblical Hebrew narrative.

Key words

• yarats ("he ran", H7323G) — qal narrative form, opening the chain of quick physical actions.
• yechabbekehu ("he embraced him", H2263) — piel (intensive) stem, giving the embrace a stronger or more emphatic sense than a simple qal form would.
• yippol ("he fell", H5307G) — qal narrative, describing the physical collapse onto the neck, continuing the vav-chain.
• yishakehu ("he kissed him", H5401A) — qal narrative; in the Masoretic text this word carries extraordinary points (dots) written above each of its letters, a scribal marking not reflected in translation.
• yivku ("they wept", H1058) — qal narrative, plural form, shifting the grammatical subject from the singular Esau (subject of the four preceding verbs) to a plural "they."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is a single unbroken narrative sequence: five verbs joined by the narrative va- ("and then…"), each advancing the action — yarats ("ran"), yechabbekehu ("embraced"), yippol ("fell"), yishakehu ("kissed"), yivku ("wept"). Grammatically, the first four verbs have Esau as their explicit singular subject (he ran, he embraced, he fell, he kissed), each object marked by the pronominal suffix -hu ("him") referring to Jacob. The fifth verb, yivku, switches without warning to a plural subject ("they wept"), which grammatically requires more than one person weeping, though the text does not name a second subject explicitly — the plural form itself is what signals that Jacob is now included in the action.

A notable graphic feature in the Masoretic tradition is the presence of dots placed above each letter of vayyishakehu ("and he kissed him"), the so-called extraordinary points. These marks are part of the transmitted text's scribal apparatus and are visible in the Hebrew consonantal string but have no equivalent representation in the Greek or Latin versions.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verb yivku ("they wept") is plural, implying more than one weeper without naming both parties. The LXX renders this with the plural verb ἔκλαυσαν ("they wept") followed by the explicit ἀμφότεροι ("both"), making explicit what the Hebrew plural form leaves implicit. The Vulgate, by contrast, uses the singular flevit ("he wept"), attributing the weeping only to the grammatical subject of the preceding verbs (Esau), diverging from both the Hebrew plural and the LXX's explicit dual.