Genesis 46:15

Summary

This verse closes the list of Leah's descendants, identifying them as the sons she bore to Jacob in Paddan-aram, together with her daughter Dinah. It concludes with a numerical summary: the total count of persons among Leah's sons and daughters was thirty-three.

Key words

• 'Elleh ("these", H0428) — demonstrative particle opening the verse, pointing back to the preceding genealogical list and marking this as its summary statement.
• yal'dah ("she had borne", H3205) — qal perfect, third person feminine singular, indicating a completed past action; the subject is Leah, expressed through the verb form itself without a separate pronoun.
• ve'et ("and ", H0854/H9002) — the conjunction combined with the direct object marker introduces Dinah as an additional object of the bearing, syntactically distinct from "sons."
• Nefesh (" person of", H5315J) — feminine singular noun in construct state, here functioning as a collective counting term ("persons," "individuals") rather than referring to soul in an abstract sense.
• banav ("sons", H1121A) with pronominal suffix -o ("his") — construct plural noun marking possession, referring back to Jacob as the one to whom these sons belong.

What the text says

The verse opens with the demonstrative 'Elleh ("these"), functioning cataphorically to summarize the list just given: bene Le'ah ("sons of Leah", construct chain). The relative clause introduced by 'asher ("whom") governs the verb yal'dah ("she had borne"), a qal perfect that encodes completed action attributed to Leah as subject. This verb takes two prepositional complements: le-Ya'aqov ("to Jacob") marking the recipient/father, and be-Paddan 'Aram ("in Paddan Aram") marking location.

The conjunction plus object marker ve'et then adds Dinah as a distinct item — grammatically she is introduced via the object marker rather than as a coordinate subject of yal'dah, though she is likewise Leah's offspring, marked as bito ("his daughter," with suffix referring to Jacob).

The closing clause uses kol-nefesh ("every person of," construct chain) followed by banav u-venotav ("his sons and his daughters") to produce a collective count: nefesh here does not mean "soul" in an abstract sense but functions as a counting unit for individuals, comparable to "head" in enumeration. The total is given by the cardinal numbers shloshim ve-shalosh ("thirty and three").

Differences between versions

The Hebrew be-Paddan 'Aram ("in Paddan Aram") is rendered in the LXX as ἐν Μεσοποταμίᾳ τῆς Συρίας ("in Mesopotamia of Syria"), substituting a Greek geographic term for the Hebrew place name; the Vulgate follows this same rendering with "in Mesopotamia Syriae." The Hebrew nefesh ("person," singular construct) is rendered in the LXX as the plural ψυχαί ("souls"), and the Vulgate uses animae ("souls"), both plural nouns, differing from the singular collective form in the Hebrew construct chain.