Discovery BoxGenesis 28:2-7 
Context28:2 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.”
6 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.
7 tn The words “the land” have been supplied in the translation for clarity.
8 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.
9 tn Heb “to take for himself from there a wife.”
10 tn The infinitive construct with the preposition and the suffix form a temporal clause.
11 tn Heb “you must not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan.”
