Genesis 37:26

Summary

Judah addresses his brothers with a rhetorical question, asking what profit or gain there would be in killing their brother and concealing his blood. The verse presents his reasoning as a direct speech introduced by a narrative verb of saying.

Key words

• vaiYomer ("he said", H0559) — qal narrative verb, marking the onset of direct speech within the story's sequence.
• Betza' ("profit", H1215) — masculine singular noun, the core of the rhetorical question about material gain.
• ki ("if/that", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the conditional clause that follows the question.
• naharog ("we will kill", H2026) — qal imperfect, first person plural, expressing a hypothetical or future action ("if we kill/were to kill").
• khiSinu ("we will conceal", H3680) — piel sequential perfect, first person plural, intensive stem indicating a deliberate act of covering, chained to the previous verb by the vav.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula vaiYomer Yehudah 'el-'echav ("and Judah said to his brothers"), a standard construction introducing direct speech in Biblical Hebrew narrative. The question itself begins with the interrogative mah-Betza' ("what profit"), a construction lacking a copula verb — Hebrew often omits "is" in nominal clauses, so the phrase is literally "what [is the] profit."

The particle ki here functions conditionally ("if"), introducing the hypothetical scenario: ki naharog 'et-'achinu ("if we kill our brother"). The verb naharog is qal imperfect first-person plural, a form that in Biblical Hebrew can express future, habitual, or hypothetical action depending on context — here the conditional ki clarifies the hypothetical sense.

The following clause, ve-khiSinu 'et-damo ("and we will conceal his blood"), uses a sequential perfect (vav-consecutive with perfect form) which continues the logical sequence begun by the imperfect verb, a common Hebrew mechanism for chaining actions in a single conceptual unit. The verb khiSinu is in the piel stem, which typically carries an intensive or deliberate nuance compared to the simpler qal stem, suggesting active concealment. The object damo ("his blood") uses dam ("blood", H1818) with a third-person singular suffix, a term that in this context stands for the physical result of the killing rather than referring to blood in a general sense.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew achinu ("our brother") without an explicit equivalent for "kill" in the fragment given (the Greek shows an incomplete verb form, ἀποκ-, likely part of ἀποκτείνωμεν, "we should kill"), but structurally parallels the Hebrew conditional with ἐάν ("if"). Where the Hebrew says damo ("his blood"), the Vulgate renders sanguinem ipsius ("his blood") literally, while the Spanish RV1909 and SBLIBRE translate this same phrase as "su muerte" ("his death"), shifting from the literal "blood" to the resulting concept of "death."