Genesis 46:2

Summary

The verse narrates a divine address to Jacob during the night: Elohim ("God", H0430G) speaks le-Yisra'el ("to Israel", H3478), Jacob's name is called twice, and Jacob answers with a formula of readiness. The Hebrew marks this as three distinct speech-acts joined by the narrative vav.

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — appears three times, each introducing a new speech event in sequence: God's initial address, the calling of the name, and Jacob's reply.
• 'Elohim ("God", H0430G) — grammatically plural noun functioning as the subject of the first va-yomer, referring to a single divine speaker.
• mar'ot ("visions of", H4759A) — feminine plural noun in construct state, linked to ha-laylah ("the night", H3915) to form "visions of the night," a plural expression for the nocturnal experience.
• Ya'aqov Ya'aqov ("Jacob, Jacob", H3290) — the personal name repeated twice in direct address, without a vocative particle.
• hineni (hine + suffix -ni, H2009 + H9040) — interjection "behold" combined with the first-person pronominal suffix "me," together forming "here I am," Jacob's spoken response.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from three coordinated clauses, each opened by va-yomer ("and he said," H0559), which is the standard narrative form used to move the story forward. This repetition means the verse does not present one continuous speech but three discrete moments: God speaks to Israel, then the name "Jacob" is called twice, and then a third va-yomer introduces the reply. The subject of this third va-yomer is not stated by a noun — it is implied by context to be Jacob, since the content is hineni ("here I am," H2009+H9040), a first-person response.

The phrase be-mar'ot ha-laylah ("in the visions of the night") uses a plural construct noun (mar'ot, H4759A) governing the singular ha-laylah ("the night," H3915), producing a construct chain meaning "visions of the night" — the plural form of the noun contrasts with a singular reading of "a vision."

The double vocative Ya'aqov Ya'aqov (H3290 twice) has no introductory particle in the Hebrew; the repetition itself carries the force of direct, emphatic address, a construction that some target languages render with an exclamation mark rather than any added vocative word.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders mar'ot ("visions," plural) with the singular ἐν ὁράματι ("in a vision"), reducing the Hebrew plural construct to one noun. The Vulgate similarly uses the singular visionem. For the third va-yomer, the LXX gives Jacob's initial reply as Τί ἐστιν ("What is it?"), differing from the Hebrew hineni ("here I am"); the Vulgate's final reply, Ecce adsum ("behold, I am present"), corresponds more closely to the Hebrew hineni. The Vulgate also compresses the first two Hebrew va-yomer clauses into a single verb, audivit ("he heard"), followed by participles vocantem and dicentem, differing from the Hebrew's threefold repeated finite verb structure.