Genesis 41:11

Summary

The cupbearer tells Pharaoh that he and the chief baker each had a dream on the same night, and that each dream carried its own distinct meaning. The verse frames the two dreams as parallel but individually significant events.

Key words

• nachalmah ("we dreamed", H2492B) — qal verb with narrative vav and a paragogic he ending, giving emphasis to the act of dreaming as the verse opens.
• chalom ("a dream", H2472) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of the dreaming, repeated later in construct form.
• ish ("each", H0376I) — literally "a man," used distributively to mean "each one" (referring to the cupbearer and the baker separately).
• fitron ("interpretation of", H6623) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linked to chalomo ("his dream," H2472 + H9023) to form "the interpretation of his dream."
• chalamnu ("we dreamed", H2492B) — qal perfect, the completed-action form of the same root that opened the verse, closing the sentence.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence begins and ends with the same verbal root, chalam ("to dream"), first as nachalmah with a narrative vav and paragogic he, then as the perfect chalamnu at the close. This repetition brackets the verse (an inclusio), framing everything in between — the night, the two dreamers, and the individualized meaning of each dream — inside the single act of dreaming. Between these two verbal forms, ani va-hu ("I and he") identifies the two dreamers explicitly, and ish ("each") introduces a distributive clause: instead of saying they shared one dream, the text specifies that each man's dream matched ke-fitron chalomo, "according to the interpretation of his own dream" — a construct chain (fitron chalomo) that ties the noun "interpretation" tightly to "his dream." The grammar thus moves from a shared circumstance (one night, one dreaming) to a distinction (two dreams, each with its own significance), a movement that the double occurrence of the same verb root at the start and end reinforces structurally.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders both instances of the Hebrew root chalam ("to dream") with the Greek verb ἴδομεν ("we saw"), producing "we saw a dream... each according to his own dream we saw," which shifts the emphasis from dreaming as an act to seeing a dream as an event. The Vulgate condenses the distributive clause about "each according to the interpretation of his own dream" into a single description, "somnium praesagum futurorum" ("a dream presaging future things"), an interpretive addition not present in the Hebrew wording, which only states that each dream had its own fitron ("interpretation") without specifying that it foretold future events.