1. the words of Laban’s sons. It is a reflection of the drastic efficiency of biblical narrative that Laban’s sons, who play only a peripheral role in the story, are not introduced at all until the point where they serve the unfolding of plot and theme. They are never given names or individual characters, and the first mention of them is in the previous chapter when Laban places the segregated particolored flocks in their charge. Here they are used to dramatize in a single quick stroke the atmosphere of suspicion and jealousy in Laban’s household: they make the extravagant claim that the visibly prospering Jacob “has taken everything of our father’s,” thus leaving them nothing. The anonymous sons would presumably be members of the pursuit party Laban forms to go after the fleeing Jacob.

2. Jacob saw Laban’s face. The physical concreteness of the image should not be obscured, as many modern translators are wont to do, by rendering this as “manner” or “attitude.” Although the Hebrew panim does have a variety of extended or figurative meanings, the point is that Jacob looks at his father-in-law’s face and sees in it a new and disquieting expression of hostility and suspicion.

3. and I will be with you. God’s words recall the language of the divine promise to Jacob in the dream-vision at Bethel.

4. Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah out to the field. Jacob proceeds in this fashion not only because he is busy tending the flocks, as he himself repeatedly reminds us in the dialogue, but also because he needs to confer with his wives in a safe location beyond earshot of Laban and his sons.

11. God’s messenger said to me in the dream. According to the source critics, divine communication to men through dream-vision is a hallmark of the Elohist, whereas the direct narrative report of the Speckled Flock story in the previous chapter makes no mention of either a dream or divine instructions and is to be attributed to the Yahwist. Whatever the validity of such identifications, they tend to scant the narrative integrity of the completed text, the ability of the biblical Arranger—to borrow a term from the criticism of Joyce’s Ulysses—to orchestrate his sources. Jacob wants to make it vividly clear to his wives at this tense juncture of imminent flight that God has been with him and will continue to be with him. It serves this purpose to explain his spectacular prosperity not as the consequence of his own ingenuity as animal breeder but as the revelation of an angel of God. It thus makes perfect narrative sense that he should omit all mention of the elaborate stratagem of the peeled rods in the troughs.

13. the God who appeared to you at Bethel. The Masoretic Text lacks “who appeared to you at” (which in the Hebrew would be just two words plus a particle), but both major Aramaic Targums, that of Onkelos and Yonatan ben Uziel, reflect this phrase, as does the Septuagint. Although the Targums are often predisposed to explanatory paraphrase, in this instance the Masoretic Hebrew sounds grammatically off, and it seems likely that they were faithfully representing a phrase that was later lost in transmission. (The Targums, which translated the Bible into the Aramaic that had become the vernacular of Palestinian Jewry, were completed in the early centuries of the Christian Era—Onkelos perhaps in the third century and Targum Yonatan at least a century later.)

14. any share in the inheritance. The Hebrew, literally, “share and inheritance,” is a hendiadys (two words for one concept, like “part and parcel”), with a denotative meaning as translated here and a connotation something like “any part at all.”

15. for he has sold us, and he has wholly consumed our money. In a socially decorous marriage, a large part of the bride-price would go to the bride. Laban, who first appeared in the narrative (chapter 24) eyeing the possible profit to himself in a betrothal transaction, has evidently pocketed all of the fruits of Jacob’s fourteen years of labor. His daughters thus see themselves reduced to chattel by their father, not married off but rather sold for profit, as though they were not his flesh and blood.

19. Laban had gone to shear his flocks. Rashi reminds us that Laban had earlier set a precedent of grazing his herds at a distance of three days’ journey from Jacob’s herds. In any case, other references to shearing of the flocks in the Bible indicate it was a very elaborate procedure involving large numbers of men, and accompanied by feasting, and so would have provided an excellent cover for Jacob’s flight.

Rachel stole the household gods. The household gods, or terafim (the etymology of the term is still in doubt), are small figurines representing the deities responsible for the well-being and prosperity of the household. The often cited parallel with the Roman penates seems quite pertinent. There is no reason to assume that Rachel would have become a strict monotheist through her marriage, and so it is perfectly understandable that she would want to take with her in her emigration the icons of these tutelary spirits, or perhaps, symbols of possession.

20. Jacob deceived Laban. Rachel makes off with, or steals, the household gods; Jacob deceives—literally, “steals the heart of Laban” (the heart being the organ of attentiveness or understanding). This verb, ganav, which suggests appropriating someone else’s property by deception or stealth, will echo through the denouement of the story. Jacob, in his response to Laban, will use a second verb, gazal, which suggests taking property by force, “to rob.” In heading for Canaan with his wives, children, and flocks, Jacob is actually taking what is rightly his (note the emphasis of legitimate possession in verse 18), but he has good reason to fear that the grasping Laban will renege on their agreement, and so he feels compelled to flee in stealth, making off not with Laban’s property but with his “heart.”

Laban the Aramean. For the first time Laban is given this gentilic identification. The stage is being set for the representation of the encounter between Jacob and Laban as a negotiation between national entities.

21. the Euphrates. The Hebrew says “the River,” a term that refers specifically to the Euphrates.

the high country of Gilead. The region in question is east of the Jordan, a little south of Lake Tiberias, and was part of Israelite territory in the First Commonwealth period. It is thus quite plausible as the setting for a border encounter between Laban the Aramean and Jacob the Hebrew.

23. pursued him a seven days’ journey. Although it would have taken Jacob, encumbered with his flocks and family, far longer to cross this distance of nearly three hundred miles, it might have been feasible for a pursuit party traveling lightly, and so the formulaic seven days actually serves to convey the terrific speed of the chase. Jacob himself will allude to this speed when instead of the more usual verb for pursuit, he refers to Laban’s “racing” after him (dalaq, a term that also means “to burn” and appears to derive from the rapid movement of fire).

24. either good or evil. As in 24:50, the idiom means “lest you speak . . . anything at all.”

26. driving my daughters. The common translation “carrying off” fudges the brutality of Laban’s language. The verb nahag is most often used for the driving of animals and is in fact the same term used in verse 18 to report Jacob’s driving his livestock.

like captives of the sword. The daughters had spoken of their father’s treating them like chattel. Laban on his part chooses a simile with ominous military implications, suggesting that Jacob has behaved like a marauding army that seizes the young women to serve as sexual and domestic slaves. It is surely not lost on Jacob that Laban is leading a group of armed men (“My hand has the might to do you harm”).

27. deceive me. At this point, Laban drops the object “heart” from the verb “to steal” or “to make off with,” and says instead “me,” either because he is using the idiom elliptically, or because he wants to say more boldly to Jacob, you have not merely deceived me (“stolen my heart”) but despoiled me (“stolen me”).

with festive songs, with timbrel and lyre. The extravagance of this fantastic scene conjured up by a past master of fleecing is self-evident. “Festive songs” is a hendiadys: the Hebrew is literally “with festivity and with songs.”

28. my sons. In this case, the reference would have to be to grandsons, despite the fact that the term is bracketed with “my daughters,” which would refer to Rachel and Leah.

30. but why did you steal my gods? Laban once more invokes the crucial verb ganav at the very end of his speech. Now the object is something that really has been stolen, though Jacob has no idea this is so. Laban refers to the missing figurines not as terafim, a term that may conceivably have a pejorative connotation, but as ʾelohai, “my gods,” real deities.

32. that person shall not live. Jacob does not imagine that anyone in his household could be guilty of the theft. If he is not unwittingly condemning Rachel to death, his peremptory words at least foreshadow her premature death in childbirth.

make recognition. The thematically fraught verb haker, which previously figured in Jacob’s deception of Isaac, will return to haunt Jacob, in precisely the imperative form in which it occurs here.

34. put them in the camel cushion and sat on them. The camel cushion may be a good hiding place, but Rachel’s sitting on the terafim is also a kind of satiric glance by the monotheistic writer on the cult of figurines, as necessity compels Rachel to assume this irreverent posture toward them.

35. for the way of women is upon me. The impotence of the irate father vis-à-vis his biologically mature daughter is comically caught in the device she hits upon, of pleading her period, in order to stay seated on the concealed figurines. Her invention involves an ironic double take because it invokes all those years of uninterrupted menses before she was at last able to conceive and bear her only son.

36. voiced his grievance. The verb here (there is no object noun in the Hebrew) is cognate with riv, a grievance brought to a court of law. Jacob’s speech is manifestly cast as a rhetorically devised plea of defense against a false accusation. Although previous commentators have noted that his language is “elevated” (Gerhard von Rad), it has not been observed that Jacob’s plea is actually formulated as poetry, following the general conventions of parallelism of biblical verse.

What is my crime, what is my guilt . . . ? These cadenced parallel questions signal the beginning of the formal plea of defense.

39. What was torn up by beasts . . . / I bore the loss. After stating in the previous verse that he took exemplary care of the flocks, Jacob goes on to declare that he assumed a degree of responsibility above and beyond what the law requires of a shepherd. Both biblical and other ancient Near Eastern codes indicate that a shepherd was not obliged to make good losses caused by beasts of prey and thieves, where no negligence was involved.

what was stolen by day and stolen by night. Again, the key verb ganav is invoked. The grammatical form of the construct state here—genuvati—uses an archaic suffix that is a linguistic marker of poetic diction.

40. Often. The Hebrew is literally “I was,” but, as E. A. Speiser notes, this verb at the beginning of a clause can be used to impart an iterative sense to what follows.

sleep was a stranger to my eyes. The Hebrew says literally, “sleep wandered from my eyes.” It is a general idiom for insomnia.

41. These twenty years in your household. When Jacob begins to work out the calculation of how many years he has served Laban in return for what, he switches from verse to prose. This enables him to repeat verbatim the words he had used in his (prose) dialogue with his wives, when he said that Laban had “switched my wages ten times over.” Understandably, what he deletes from that earlier speech is the blunt accusation that Laban “tricked me.”

42. He determined in my favor. Jacob uses the same verb of legal vindication that he invoked in his poetic self-defense—“they shall determine between us two.”

43. The daughters are my daughters. Laban begins his response by refusing to yield an inch in point of legal prerogative. But he concedes that there is nothing he can do about his daughters and all his grandsons—on the face of it, because of their evident attachment to Jacob, and, perhaps, because he fears to use the force he possesses against Jacob after the divine warning in the night-vision.

45. Jacob took a stone. Invited to make a pact, Jacob immediately resorts to the language of stones, as after the Bethel epiphany and in his first encounter with Rachel at the well. Thus, in sequence, the stones are associated with religious experience, personal experience, and now politics. Here, there is a doubling in the use of stones: a large stone as a commemorative pillar (and border marker) and a pile of smaller stones as a commemorative mound.

47. Yegar-Sahadutha . . . Gal-Ed. The international character of the transaction is nicely caught in Laban the Aramean’s use of an Aramaic term while Jacob uses Hebrew. Both names mean “mound of witness.”

49. and Mizpah. This is an alternate name for the height of Gilead. The meaning is “lookout point,” as Laban’s next words make etymologically clear.

51–52. Look, this mound, and, look, the pillar . . . witness be the mound and witness the pillar. The studied repetitions and rhetorical flourishes that characterize Laban’s speech throughout reflect its function as a performative speech-act, stipulating the binding terms of the treaty.

I will not cross over to you . . . past this pillar. At this point, the story of bitter familial struggle is also made an etiology for political history. What Laban is designating here is clearly an international border.

53. the gods of their fathers. These words, with the pronoun referent “they,” could not be part of Laban’s dialogue and so must be a gloss, perhaps occasioned by the discomfort of a scribe or editor with the exact grammatical equation between the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor in Laban’s oath.

Jacob swore by the Terror of his father Isaac. This denomination of the deity, which occurs only in this episode, is strange enough to have prompted some biblical scholars to argue, unconvincingly, that the name has nothing to do with terror or fear. What is noteworthy is that Jacob resists the universal Semitic term for God, ʾelohim, and the equation between the gods of Nahor and Abraham. He himself does not presume to go back as far as Abraham, but in the God of his father Isaac he senses something numinous, awesome, frightening.

54. offered sacrifice . . . ate bread. The treaty-vow is solemnly confirmed by a sacred meal. The term zevaḤ refers both to a ceremonial meal of meat and to sacrifice. In effect, the two are combined: the fat of the animal is burned as an offering, the meat is consumed by those who offer the sacrifice. As frequently elsewhere in biblical usage, “bread” is a synecdoche for the whole meal.