Once when Jacob was boiling pottage: Once translates the regular Hebrew connective, which serves here as a transition marker opening this episode. Good News Translation “One day” provides a useful model for many languages. Boiling translates the precise meaning of the Hebrew word, but “cooking” represents the general act more suitably in English. Pottage translates a word referring to something boiled, namely, a broth or soup. In verse 30 it will be called “red pottage,” and in verse 34 “pottage of lentils.” In this verse a term may be used that refers to a soup, broth, or stew that contains vegetables and perhaps bits of meat. If such a soup or stew is unknown in the local diet, it is possible to use a general expression for cooked food. Biblia Dios Habla Hoy offers another possibility. It omits any reference to the kind of food and says “One day Jacob was cooking….”

Esau came in from the field: field translates the same word as in verse 27. The reference is not to a cultivated field where crops are grown but to the open countryside where probably Esau has been hunting.

And he was famished: famished means to be weak and faint from having gone without food for a long while. This idea is sometimes expressed idiomatically; for example, “hunger held him by the throat” or “hunger burned his stomach.”

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 .