Genesis 37:5

Summary

Genesis 37:5 narrates that Joseph had a dream, told it to his brothers, and that this report caused them to increase their hatred toward him. The verse is built as a chain of three narrative actions: dreaming, telling, and the brothers' escalating hostility.

Key words

• yachalom ("he dreamed", H2492B) — qal narrative verb, marking the first event in the sequence ("and then he dreamed").
• chalom ("a dream", H2472) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of the dreaming, forming a cognate pair with the verb (he dreamed a dream).
• yagged ("he told [it]", H5046) — hiphil (causative) narrative verb; the causative stem implies Joseph actively caused the content of the dream to be known, not merely spoke about it.
• yosifu ("they increased", H3254H) — hiphil narrative verb, again causative, indicating the brothers actively intensified an existing state (hatred), not that hatred arose for the first time.
• seno ("to hate", H8130) — qal infinitive, functioning as the object of "they increased," literally "they increased to hate him," i.e., they added to their hating.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is structured as three successive narrative clauses linked by the vav consecutive (va, H9001), which chains events in sequence: "and he dreamed... and he told... and they increased." The construction yachalom chalom ("he dreamed a dream") uses a verb and its cognate noun together, a common Hebrew pattern that reinforces the verb's action rather than adding new information.

The final clause, vayosifu od seno oto ("and they increased still to hate him"), places the finite verb yosifu ("they increased") before the infinitive seno ("to hate"), so the increase is expressed as the main action and the hatred as its content. This construction implies that hatred already existed before this episode and was intensified by the news of the dream, rather than beginning at this point. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) with the suffix -o ("him") explicitly marks Joseph as the target of the increased hatred.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the final clause not as a repeated narrative action but as a summarizing statement — "quæ causa majoris odii seminarium fuit" ("which became a seed of greater hatred") — shifting from the Hebrew's verbal chain of sequential events to an explanatory clause about causation. The LXX text given lacks an explicit verb corresponding to yagged ("he told"), presenting the dream and the brothers only in participial/nominal form without a finite "told" verb visible in the provided text, in contrast to the Hebrew's clear finite hiphil verb.