Genesis 37:4

Summary

The verse narrates that Joseph's brothers perceived their father's greater love for him, developed hatred toward him as a result, and reached a point where peaceful speech with him became impossible. The Hebrew presents three sequential actions joined by narrative verb forms: seeing, hating, and being unable to speak peaceably.

Key words

• va-yyir'u ("and they saw", H7200) — qal narrative form; the initial vav links this clause directly to the preceding narrative, marking the perception as the triggering event.
• 'ahav ("he loved", H157) — qal perfect, marking a completed/settled state (the father's love) that serves as the content of what the brothers perceived, introduced by ki ("that", H3588A).
• va-yyisne'u ("and they hated", H8130) — qal narrative form paralleling va-yyir'u, showing hatred as the next link in the narrative chain following the seeing.
• yakhelu ("they were able", H3201) — qal perfect with the negation lo' ("not", H3808), expressing a completed incapacity rather than an ongoing one.
• dabbero ("to speak to him", H1696G) — piel infinitive with pronominal suffix; the piel stem intensifies the basic root "to speak," and combined with le-shalom ("to/for welfare", H7965G) forms the idiom for peaceful or friendly speech.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs: va-yyir'u ("and they saw"), va-yyisne'u ("and they hated"), and the concluding clause with lo' yakhelu ("they were not able"). This chaining presents the events as a sequential cause-and-effect progression rather than as simultaneous or loosely connected facts: seeing leads to hating, which leads to an inability to speak peaceably.

The object of the brothers' perception is introduced by ki ("that", H3588A), governing the clause 'oto 'ahav 'avihem mi-kol 'echav — literally "him loved their-father from-all his-brothers," meaning the father loved him more than all his brothers. The construct chains 'avi-hem ("father of them" = "their father") and kol 'echav ("all of his brothers") show how possession and comparison are built through juxtaposed nouns rather than separate comparative words; the comparative sense itself rests on the preposition mi ("more than", H9006) attached to kol.

The final clause uses the piel infinitive dabbero together with the idiomatic phrase le-shalom ("to welfare/peace"), meaning speech oriented toward peaceful relations. The piel stem here intensifies the basic sense of speaking, and the phrase as a whole denotes not mere silence but a breakdown of amicable communication.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'avihem ("their father", H1+H9028) simply as ho patēr ("the father"), without the possessive suffix explicit in Hebrew, and translates le-shalom ("to welfare", H7965G) as ouden eirēnikon ("nothing peaceable"), adding a negative quantifier not present as a separate Hebrew word. The Vulgate renders the sentence as a single subordinate construction ("quod...amaretur") using a passive verb, differing from the Hebrew's active 'ahav ("he loved") with explicit subject 'avihem ("their father").