Genesis 41:43

Summary

The verse describes Pharaoh causing Joseph to ride in his second chariot, having men proclaim something before him, and formally placing him over all the land of Egypt. The Hebrew marks these three actions with distinct verbal forms that show causation, public proclamation, and emphatic installation.

Key words

• yarkev ("he made ride", H7392) — hiphil (causative) stem: Pharaoh does not ride but causes Joseph to ride, marking Pharaoh as the agent behind the honor.
• mirkevet hamishneh ("chariot of the second", H4818/H4932H) — construct chain meaning "the chariot of the second [rank]," i.e., a chariot belonging to Pharaoh's second-highest position.
• avrekh ("bend the knee", H0086) — an interjection of uncertain precise sense, cried out before Joseph; its grammatical isolation (not a verb in a normal clause) suggests it functions as a shouted command or acclamation rather than a narrated action.
• naton ("he put", H5414H) — infinitive absolute used to intensify the following action ("he indeed put/set him"), a construction that has no direct one-word equivalent in English or Latin.
• 'oto (H0853, twice, lines 3 and 20) — the direct object marker with pronominal suffix "him," marking Joseph as the recipient of both the chariot-riding and the placement over Egypt.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chain of three narrative actions linked by the vav consecutive: va-yarkev ("and he made ride"), va-yikre'u ("and they called out"), and ve-naton ("and he put"), the last introduced not as a plain finite verb but as an infinitive absolute — a Hebrew construction that adds emphasis to the final act of installation, something like "and he put him, indeed" over the land. This grammatical shift from consecutive finite verbs to an infinitive absolute at the end signals a summarizing, weighty conclusion to the sequence of honors.

The cry avrekh stands outside the normal clause structure as a bare interjection, without a subject or verb governing it directly in the Hebrew text — the crowd's or heralds' words are quoted but not integrated grammatically into a full sentence, which leaves its exact semantic content in the Hebrew somewhat opaque beyond the general sense of a proclamation demanding submission.

Differences between versions

The LXX does not render avrekh as an interjection at all; it supplies a noun, κήρυξ ("herald"), stating that "a herald proclaimed before him," turning the shouted word into a description of an office. The Vulgate similarly abandons the interjection, expanding it into a clause: "the herald crying out, that all should bend the knee before him," explicitly supplying the verb "flectere" (to bend) that the Hebrew leaves compressed in a single word. Both LXX and Vulgate also convert the Hebrew infinitive absolute naton into ordinary finite verbs (κατέστησεν; praepositum esse scirent), losing the intensifying emphasis carried by the Hebrew form.