Genesis 41:31

Summary

The verse states that the abundance experienced during the years of plenty will not be perceptible or recognized in the land, because the famine following it will be extremely severe. The Hebrew builds a cause-effect relationship: the coming famine's intensity will overshadow all memory or trace of the prior abundance.

Key words

• yi.va.Da' ("it will be known", H3045) — niphal imperfect, giving the verb a passive sense: the abundance is not merely absent but "will not be known/perceived," implying it leaves no discernible trace.
• sa.Va' ("plenty", H7647) — masculine singular noun, the grammatical subject of the passive verb; it is the abundance itself that fails to register.
• pe.Nei ("because of", H6440) — masculine plural construct, literally "face of," an idiomatic construction meaning "on account of" or "due to."
• kha.Ved ("heavy", H3515) — masculine singular adjective, describing the famine's weight or intensity; combined with me.'Od ("very", H3966), it intensifies the description to an extreme degree.
• ha.Hu' ("that", H1931) — personal pronoun functioning demonstratively, pointing back to "the famine" just mentioned, marking it as a specific, defined event.

What the text says

The sentence opens with a negated niphal verb, yi.va.Da', which places the abundance (sa.Va') in the passive role of "not being known." This grammatical choice shifts the focus from an active agent to the state of the abundance itself — it does not merely become invisible, but fails to be recognized as a category of experience, submerged by what follows. The prepositional phrase mi-pe.Nei ha.ra.'Av ha.hu' ("because of that famine") uses the idiom pe.Nei ("face of") to express causation, a common construction in Biblical Hebrew for "due to" or "in the presence of."

The temporal marker 'a.cha.rei-khen ("after that") sets the famine in sequence following the abundance. The final clause, introduced by ki ("for"), gives the reason for the imperceptibility: the famine will be kha.Ved... me.'Od ("heavy... very"), an adjectival intensification without a copular verb in the Hebrew, typical of Hebrew's tendency to omit "to be" in present/predictive descriptions.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the verse with markedly different imagery: "et ubertatis magnitudinem perditura est inopiæ magnitudo" ("the greatness of scarcity will destroy the greatness of abundance"), introducing an active verb of destruction (perditura est) absent from the Hebrew's passive construction. The LXX preserves the causal structure closer to the Hebrew, rendering kha.Ved as ischyros ("strong") rather than "heavy." The English translations diverge in emphasis: BSB retains "will not be remembered," closer to the niphal's passive sense, while SBLIBRE restructures the sentence to foreground the famine's severity before mentioning the forgotten abundance.