Genesis 35:9

Summary

The verse narrates a second appearance of God to Jacob, occurring at the moment of his return from Paddan-aram, and states that God blessed him. Two sequential verbal actions are marked: the appearing and the blessing, both introduced by narrative vav.

Key words

• va-yera' ("and he appeared", H7200G) — niphal narrative form; the niphal stem gives the appearance a passive/reflexive nuance, meaning God "made himself seen" rather than simply "was seen" by an external agent.
• Elohim ("God", H0430G) — grammatically plural noun functioning as the subject of a singular verb (yera' is 3rd person masculine singular), a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew for this divine name.
• od ("again", H5750) — placed after "to Jacob," marking this as a repeated event distinct from a prior appearance.
• be-vo'o ("when he came", H0935G + H9043) — infinitive construct with pronominal suffix "his," forming a temporal clause: "in his coming," i.e., "when he came."
• va-yevarekh ("and he blessed", H1288) — piel narrative form; the piel stem intensifies the action, and the narrative vav sequences it as following directly from the appearance.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two narrative-sequence verbs (va-yera' and va-yevarekh), both introduced by the narrative vav that chains events in sequence: "and he appeared... and he blessed." Between these two main verbs sits a temporal clause formed by the preposition be ("when") plus the infinitive vo' ("came") plus the suffix -o ("his"), literally "in his coming from Paddan Aram" — a construction that Hebrew uses to mark simultaneity or immediate sequence without a finite temporal verb.

The word od ("again") stands between "to Jacob" and the temporal clause, signaling that this is not the first divine appearance to Jacob in the narrative. The object of the blessing in the second clause is marked by the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated grammatically) plus the suffix -o ("him"), producing 'oto — a redundant but standard way to mark a definite pronominal object in Hebrew narrative prose. The subject "God" (Elohim) is expressed once at the start and is not repeated before the second verb, both actions being understood as performed by the same subject.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the temporal clause differently, adding a place name: "ἔτι ἐν Λοῦζα" ("still in Luza"), where the Hebrew text has no place name at this point but only od ("again") followed by the temporal clause about coming from Paddan-aram. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew structure more closely with "iterum" ("again") and "postquam reversus est" ("after he returned"), without inserting a place name.