Genesis 35:18

Summary

The verse narrates the moment of Rachel's death as she gives birth: as her life "goes out," she names the child Ben-Oni, but the father renames him Benjamin. The text contrasts the mother's naming act with the father's subsequent, different naming act.

Key words

• Tzet ("went out", H3318) — infinitive construct, functioning as "in the going out of," marking the temporal circumstance of the main clause (her life departing).
• nafshah ("her life/soul", H5315) — feminine singular noun in construct with the suffix "her," the subject of the departing action; construct form ties it directly to the following pronoun as "her nefesh."
• metah ("she died", H4191) — qal perfect, third feminine singular, denoting a completed action, explaining (via the particle ki, H3588A) why her nefesh was going out.
• tikra' ("she called", H7121H) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive imperfect), third feminine singular, continuing the story sequence: after the dying, the naming occurs.
• qara' ("he called", H7121H) — same root as above but qal perfect, third masculine singular, marking the father's separate, non-sequential act of naming, distinguished grammatically from the mother's narrative-form verb.

What the text says

The clause opens with the narrative marker va-yehi ("and it was", H1961+H9001), a standard formula introducing a temporal setting. The temporal clause itself uses the infinitive Tzet ("going out", H3318) governing the construct noun nafshah ("her life", H5315) — literally "in the going-out of her nefesh" — followed by the causal particle ki ("for", H3588A) and the perfect verb metah ("she died", H4191), which supplies the explanation for the preceding clause rather than advancing the narrative timeline (perfect aspect marks completed background information).

The main narrative then resumes with va-tikra' ("and she called", H7121H), a vav-consecutive form that signals the next event in sequence: the mother names the child Ben-Oni (H1126). The second half of the verse shifts subject with ve-avio qara'-lo ("and his father called him", H7121H): here the same root qara' appears not as a narrative vav-form but as a simple perfect, which — combined with the explicit conjunction ve- ("and") rather than a vav-consecutive — sets the father's naming apart syntactically from the mother's, presenting it almost as a separate, contrasting statement rather than a strict continuation of the same narrative chain. The construct nouns shem ("name", H8034) and avi ("father", H0001G) both take pronominal suffixes ("his") that anchor the naming acts to the child and to Jacob respectively.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Ben-Oni not as a transliterated name but as a translated phrase, "Υἱὸς ὀδύνης μου" ("son of my pain"), making explicit a meaning that the Hebrew text leaves as a proper name without gloss. The Vulgate similarly supplies interpretive glosses in apposition: "Benomi, id est, Filius doloris mei" for the first name and "Benjamin, id est, Filius dextræ" for the second, explanations not present as separate clauses in the Hebrew text itself, which gives only the two proper names, Ben-Oni (H1126) and Vinyamin (H1144), without embedded translation.