Genesis 41:26

Summary

The verse restates the interpretation of Pharaoh's two dream images—seven good cows and seven good ears of grain—identifying both as symbols for seven years. It closes by declaring that the two visions (cows and grain) constitute a single dream, not two separate ones.

Key words

• pa.Rot ("cows", H6510) — feminine plural noun, subject of the first nominal clause.
• to.Vot ("good", H2896A) — feminine plural adjective, agreeing with parot, repeated later with shibbolim ("ears of grain") to mark the same quality in both images.
• sha.Nim ("years", H8141) — masculine plural noun functioning as the predicate identifying what the cows/grain represent.
• He.nah ("they", H2007) — feminine plural personal pronoun, used here as a copula linking subject and predicate in a verbless nominal sentence ("seven good cows — seven years — they [are]").
• cha.Lom 'e.Chad ("one dream", H2472 + H0259) — masculine singular noun with feminine singular numeral adjective, stating that the two visions form a single unit of meaning.

What the text says

The verse is built from two parallel verbless clauses, each following the pattern: subject (cows / ears of grain) + adjective ("good") + predicate ("seven years") + pronoun henah ("they"). In Biblical Hebrew, nominal sentences often lack a verb "to be"; the pronoun henah serves this copulative function, asserting identity between the animals/grain and the number of years. This repetition creates a tight syntactic parallelism between the cow-image and the grain-image, reinforcing that both symbols carry the same numerical meaning.

The final clause, chalom 'echad hu ("one dream it [is]"), uses the singular pronoun hu (H1931) and the singular noun chalom to state that despite the two distinct images described earlier in the narrative, they belong to a single dream-event rather than two independent dreams. The numeral 'echad ("one", H0259) is grammatically feminine to agree with the implied antecedent structure in Hebrew numeral usage, though it modifies the masculine noun chalom.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint adds τὸ ἐνύπνιον Φαραὼ ("the dream of Pharaoh"), explicitly naming Pharaoh as the dreamer, where the Hebrew simply says chalom 'echad hu ("it is one dream") without naming the dreamer. The Vulgate renders the final clause more interpretively as eamdemque vim somnii comprehendunt ("they comprehend the same force of the dream"), shifting from the Hebrew's identity-statement ("it is one dream") to a statement about shared meaning or significance, a more discursive paraphrase than a direct translation of the Hebrew wording.