Genesis 28:8

Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex)

English Translation

Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan didn't please Isaac, his father.

World English Bible · Public Domain

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כְּנָ֑עַן

Kᵉnaʻan

H3667

“Canaan”

Noun, Proper

Appears 94× in the Hebrew Bible
First appears at Genesis 9:18

Full BDB Definition

Origin: from H3665

TWOT: 1002 , 1002b

Canaan = "lowland" - the 4th son of Ham and the progenitor of the Phoenicians and of the various nations who peopled the seacoast of Palestine (noun proper masculine) - the land west of the Jordan peopled by the descendants of Canaan and subsequently conquered by the Israelites under Joshua (noun proper locative) - merchant, trader (noun masculine)

About this verse

These counts appear in no published source. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged text and Lemma’s own curated glosses. What Lemma adds →

9: words
9: distinct lemmas
Pentateuch: section

Grammatical profile

1 verb
6 nouns
1 adjective
1 conjunction

Verb forms

וַיַּ֣רְא Qal · Sequential Imperfect

Hebrew & Septuagint length

In English translation the verse runs 12 words from the Hebrew and 16 from the Septuagint (LXX English) — closely comparable.

A rough comparison of the two English renderings, which tokenize alike — not a word-level alignment.

Word counts can differ between the Hebrew and the Greek without any difference in meaning — e.g. the Hebrew direct-object marker אֵת has no separate Greek word, and Greek often adds the article ὁ.

In the original languages it is 9 Hebrew tokens and 14 Greek tokens — but the two are counted differently (Hebrew bundles its prefixes and suffixes into one token; the Greek is in lemma form), so that isn’t a like-for-like length.

Cross-references

Topical passages linked to Genesis 28:8 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge — connected by theme and wording, ordered by reader-vote popularity; previews shown in the World English Bible.

Genesis 24:3 I will make you swear by Yahweh, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that you shall not take a wife for my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live.
Genesis 26:34–35 When Esau was forty years old, he took as wife Judith, the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath, the daughter of Elon the Hittite.
Genesis 28:1 Isaac called Jacob, blessed him, and commanded him, "You shall not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan.
1 Samuel 8:6 But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. Samuel prayed to Yahweh.

Cross-references courtesy of OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0).

Hebrew and Greek witnesses Masoretic Hebrew ↔ Greek Septuagint

The same verse in the two great witnesses to the Old Testament, shown verse-for-verse.

These are two independent witnesses, not word-aligned to each other, and the Septuagint is shown in lemma (dictionary) form.

Hebrew Genesis 28:8 Masoretic · Westminster Leningrad Codex

וַיַּ֣רְא עֵשָׂ֔ו כִּ֥י רָע֖וֹת בְּנ֣וֹת כְּנָ֑עַן בְּעֵינֵ֖י יִצְחָ֥ק אָבִֽיו

Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan didn't please Isaac, his father.

World English Bible · Public Domain

Greek LXX Genesis 28:8 Septuagint · lemma form

καί ὁράω ησαυ ὅτι πονηρός εἰμί ὁ θυγάτηρ χανααν ἐναντίον ισαακ ὁ πατήρ αὐτός

And Esau also having seen that the daughters of Chanaan were evil before his father Isaac,

LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) · Public Domain

Hebrew: Westminster Leningrad Codex (CC BY 4.0). Greek: Septuagint (public domain); English from LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) (Public Domain). How the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew →

Targum (Aramaic paraphrase)

The Targum is the ancient Jewish Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures — an interpretive translation, not the Hebrew text itself. Onkelos (literal) and Pseudo-Jonathan (expansive) render the Torah, and Jonathan the Prophets. Coverage is partial: where no permissively-licensed English translation exists for a verse, only the Aramaic is shown. This is verse-level text, not a word-by-word alignment to the Hebrew.

Targum Onkelos Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy)

וַחֲזָא עֵשָׂו אֲרֵי בִישָׁא בְּנַת כְּנָעַן בְּעֵינֵי יִצְחָק אֲבוּהִי

(no public-domain English translation for this verse)

Targum Onkelos — Aramaic: “Onkelos Genesis” (public domain); “Onkelos Exodus” (public domain); “Onkelos Leviticus” (public domain); “Onkelos Numbers” (public domain); “Onkelos Deuteronomy” (public domain). English: “Sefaria Community Translation” (CC0 1.0 (public-domain dedication)); “J.W. Etheridge. The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel on the Pentateuch. London: Longmans, Green, 1862” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy)

וַחֲמָא עֵשָו אֲרוּם בִּישַׁן בְּנַתְהוֹן דִכְנַעֲנָאֵי קֳדָם יִצְחָק אָבוּי

and Esau considered that the daughters of Kenaan were evil before Izhak his father,

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan — Aramaic: “Targum Jonathan on Genesis” (public domain); “Targum Jonathan on Exodus” (public domain); “Targum Jonathan on Leviticus” (public domain); “Targum Jonathan on Numbers” (public domain); “Targum Jonathan on Deuteronomy” (public domain). English: “The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.

Commentary

Notes on Genesis 28:8 from classic Christian and Jewish commentators (each source and its license shown beneath its notes). The classic Christian expositions comment on the surrounding passage and are grouped to its opening verse, so a note may address several verses; the Jewish commentaries on the Tanakh (Rashi and others) are per-verse, so they appear only where the commentator wrote on this verse.

Lemma curates 59 commentaries, every one of them public domain or Creative Commons licensed, each selected and text-cleaned for this edition rather than reprinted as found. About our sources →

Trapp's Complete Commentary

John Trapp

Gen 28:8 And Esau seeing that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father;

Ver. 8. Pleased not Isaac his father.] Whether himself or they pleased God or not, was no part of his care. God is not in all the wicked man’s thoughts. {Psa 10:4} What he strives for is, to be well esteemed of by others, to have the good will and good word of his neighbours and friends, such especially as he hopes for benefit by. Thus Julian counterfeited zeal, till he had got the empire: afterwards, of Julian, he became Idolian, as Nazianzen saith he was commonly called, because he set open again the idols’ temples, which had been shut up by Constantine, and restored them to the heathens.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

John Gill's Exposition

And Esau seeing that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father. Who he perceived was displeased with the daughters of Canaan, or that they were "evil in his eyes" (i), offensive to him, and disapproved of by him, because of their ill manners: Rebekah is not mentioned, whose displeasure he cared not for.

(i) "malae in oculis", Montanus, Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Drusius, Schmidt.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

unfoldingWord translationNotes

Door43 World Missions Community

General Information:

This continues the background information about Esau.

Esau saw

"Esau realized"

the women of Canaan did not please Isaac his father

"his father Isaac did not approve of the women of Canaan"

women of Canaan

"daughters of Canaan" or "the Canaanite women"

So he went

"Because of that, he went"

besides the wives that he had

"in addition to the wives that he already had"

Mahalath

This is the name of one of Ishmael's daughters. (See: How to Translate Names)

Nebaioth

This is the name of one of Ishmael's sons. (See: How to Translate Names)

translationWords

Canaan

ancestor

Ishmael

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

Radak

Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak)

וישמע, Esau also heard that Yaakov had obediently followed his father’s instructions to get himself a wife from that far away He “saw” now that רעות בנות כנען, that the daughters of the Canaanite whom he had married were considered as evil in the eyes of his father Yitzchok. Even though he had been fully aware of this already previously, seeing that his father had already protested his marrying these girls at the time, he had not made it a major issue to forbid him to marry them as he knew that his major seed would not be Esau. Now Esau realised how deeply his father resented these daughters-in-law seeing he had sent Yaakov such a long way to get himself a wife from Charan. This is why he went to Ishmael.

Radak on the Tanakh — English translations: “Sefaria Community Translation” (CC0 1.0 (public-domain dedication)); “Eliyahu Munk, HaChut Hameshulash” (CC BY 4.0); “Rabbi Mike Feuer, Jerusalem Anthology” (CC BY 4.0); and “R. David Kimhi on the first book of Psalms, Translated by R.G. Finch, London, 1919” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.

Lesson kit

Teaching starters — assembled from the data on this page, not authored interpretation. Every prompt links to the verse data it draws on. Edit before teaching.

Genesis, in the Pentateuch, opens this verse with 9 words (9 distinct Hebrew lemmas). Its most distinctive word is Kᵉnaʻan (“Canaan”). A historical commentator’s framing appears above. Read the whole chapter for the surrounding context.

Discussion questions

How does “Canaan” (Kᵉnaʻan) shape what this verse is saying?
Genesis 24:3 shares this passage’s theme. How do the two illuminate each other?
The translations on this page render this verse differently — a whole-verse word diff, not a word-by-word alignment. What might account for the different wordings?
The verb «וַיַּ֣רְא» is Qal Sequential Imperfect. How does its form color the action?
Reading how Trapp's Complete Commentary and John Gill's Exposition read this verse, where do the two commentators agree and where do they part?

Things to notice

This verse counts 9 Hebrew ↔ 14 Greek words.
These translations choose different wording for 7 words in this verse.
9 distinct Hebrew lemmas span 9 words in this verse.