Genesis 28:2-7

28:2 Leave immediately ¹  for Paddan Aram! Go to the house of Bethuel, your mother’s father, and find yourself a wife there, among the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother. 28:3 May the sovereign God ²  bless you! May he make you fruitful and give you a multitude of descendants! ³  Then you will become ⁴  a large nation. ⁵  28:4 May he give you and your descendants the blessing he gave to Abraham ⁶  so that you may possess the land ⁷  God gave to Abraham, the land where you have been living as a temporary resident.” ⁸  28:5 So Isaac sent Jacob on his way, and he went to Paddan Aram, to Laban son of Bethuel the Aramean and brother of Rebekah, the mother of Jacob and Esau.

28:6 Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him off to Paddan Aram to find a wife there. ⁹  As he blessed him, ¹⁰  Isaac commanded him, “You must not marry a Canaanite woman.” ¹¹  28:7 Jacob obeyed his father and mother and left for Paddan Aram.

¹ tn Heb “Arise! Go!” The first of the two imperatives is adverbial and stresses the immediacy of the departure.

² tn Heb “El Shaddai.” See the extended note on the phrase “sovereign God” in Gen 17:1.

³ tn Heb “and make you fruitful and multiply you.” See Gen 17:6, 20 for similar terminology.

⁴ tn The perfect verbal form with vav (ו) consecutive here indicates consequence. The collocation הָיָה + preposition לְ (hayah + lÿ) means “become.”

⁵ tn Heb “an assembly of peoples.”

³ tn Heb “and may he give to you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your offspring with you.” The name “Abraham” is an objective genitive here; this refers to the blessing that God gave to Abraham.

⁴ tn The words “the land” have been supplied in the translation for clarity.

⁵ tn Heb “the land of your sojournings,” that is, the land where Jacob had been living as a resident alien, as his future descendants would after him.

⁴ tn Heb “to take for himself from there a wife.”

⁵ tn The infinitive construct with the preposition and the suffix form a temporal clause.

⁶ tn Heb “you must not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan.”