Genesis 42:11

Summary

The brothers make a threefold self-defense before Joseph: they are all sons of the same man, they are honest, and they (referring to themselves as "your servants") have never been spies. The verse is built as three short verbless or verb-final clauses stacked in sequence.

Key words

• kullanu ("all of us", H3605) — construct noun + 1st person plural suffix, forming "the totality of us," used here as the subject opening the sentence.
• benei ("sons of", H1121A) — masculine plural construct, linking to 'ish 'echad ("one man," H0376G + H0259) to form the chain "sons of one man."
• kenim ("honest", H3651A) — masculine plural adjective, predicate of a verbless clause with the pronoun anachnu ("we", H0587).
• 'avadeikha ("your servants", H5650) — masculine plural construct + 2nd person masculine singular suffix; the brothers refer to themselves in the third person as a mark of deference toward the addressee.
• meraggelim ("spies", H7270) — piel participle, masculine plural, describing an ongoing or characteristic activity ("the ones who spy"), not a simple noun.

What the text says

The verse contains three short clauses. The first two, kullanu benei 'ish 'echad nachnu ("all of us are sons of one man") and kenim anachnu ("we are honest"), are verbless nominal clauses in which the independent pronouns nachnu and anachnu function as the copula, linking subject and predicate without any verb "to be." This is a standard construction in Biblical Hebrew for stating identity or quality.

The third clause shifts both grammatically and rhetorically: lo'-hayu 'avadeikha meraggelim ("your servants have not been spies") uses the qal perfect verb hayu ("they were/have been", H1961) negated by lo' (H3808), with the subject expressed not as "we" but as 'avadeikha, "your servants" — a third-person self-reference directed at the addressee (Joseph, viewed by them as an Egyptian official). This move from first-person pronouns to a deferential third-person self-designation is a nuance that a flat translation using "we" throughout the verse does not preserve. The predicate meraggelim is a piel participle, portraying "spying" as a characteristic action rather than a static label, so the clause denies an activity or role rather than merely a category.

Differences between versions

Where the Hebrew kenim ("honest", H3651A) describes moral truthfulness, the LXX renders it as εἰρηνικοί ("peaceable"), and the Vulgate follows with pacifici ("peaceable, peaceful"), both shifting the sense from "truthful" toward "non-hostile intent." The Hebrew construct chain benei 'ish 'echad ("sons of one man") is rendered consistently by LXX (υἱοὶ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου) and Vulgate (filii unius viri), showing no divergence there.