And Isaac was forty years old … Rebekah: in many languages this information provides the time element that needs to be expressed as “When Isaac was forty years old…” or “When Isaac reached the age of forty….” When he took to wife Rebekah has been revised in New Revised Standard Version to say “when he married Rebekah.” See Good News Translation.

The remainder of verse 20 identifies Rebekah as the daughter of Bethuel and the sister of Laban. It further identifies the two men as being Aramean and Bethuel as being associated with Paddan-aram. For Aramean see the discussion of “Aram” at 10.22. Paddan-aram occurs for the first time here but is repeated a number of times later in Genesis. In 24.10 it is called in Hebrew Aram-Naharaim “Aram of the two rivers.” See there for comments. It is another name for Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq.

Good News Translation has placed “an Aramean from Mesopotamia” between parentheses. However, parentheses or other punctuation marks may not be useful in some languages. It is sometimes necessary to form two sentences; for example, “Rebekah was the daughter of Bethuel and the sister of Laban. They were Arameans from Mesopotamia.” Sister may need to be expressed by a term meaning “younger sister”; in some languages this relationship is expressed by a term that means “sibling of the opposite sex” (that is, sister of a man or brother of a woman).

It is probably not necessary to say that Laban was an Aramean, since that information can be gathered from his father being Aramean. Bible en français courant places Laban before Bethuel: “Rebekah, sister of Laban and daughter of Bethuel, an Aramean from Upper-Mesopotamia.” Translators may wish to follow this model.

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. and Fry, Euan McG. A Handbook on Genesis. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1997. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .