Genesis 42:31

Summary

This verse reports the speech of Joseph's brothers recounting to Jacob what they had told the Egyptian official (Joseph) about themselves. They affirm their honesty and deny being spies, using a first-person plural report embedded in narrative discourse.

Key words

• No.mer ("we said", H0559) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive), marking the next event in the retelling: "and we said."
• ke.Nim ("[are] honest", H3651A) — masculine plural adjective functioning as predicate, describing the collective self-identity of the brothers.
• 'a.Na.che.nu ("we", H0587) — independent personal pronoun, placed after the predicate adjective, emphasizing the subject "we" in the nominal clause "honest [are] we."
• ha.Yi.nu ("we are/were", H1961) — qal perfect, denoting a completed state in the past ("we were/have been"), negated by lo' ("not", H3808).
• me.ra.ge.Lim ("spies", H7270) — piel participle, masculine plural, describing an ongoing or characteristic action ("ones who spy"), used here as a noun-like predicate denying that identity.

What the text says

The verse is built as a report of direct speech introduced by va-No.mer ("and we said"), which continues the narrative chain from the preceding verses. The reported speech itself contains two short nominal/verbal clauses. The first, ke.Nim 'a.Na.che.nu ("honest we"), places the predicate adjective ke.Nim before the pronoun 'a.Na.che.nu, a common Hebrew word order for identifying statements, giving weight to the quality "honest" as the main assertion.

The second clause, lo' ha.Yi.nu me.ra.ge.Lim ("we were not spies"), uses the qal perfect ha.Yi.nu to negate a past state, rather than a present one — grammatically this denies having been spies as a completed condition, not simply denying being spies now. The participle me.ra.ge.Lim comes from the piel stem, which in Biblical Hebrew often marks intensive or repeated action; here it characterizes the accused activity of "spying" as a habitual or ongoing role rather than a single act.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew adjective ke.Nim ("honest", H3651A) is rendered in the LXXSWETE as εἰρηνικοί ("peaceful") and in the Vulgate as pacifici ("peaceful ones"), both shifting the semantic field from "honesty/truthfulness" to "peacefulness." The BSB and SBLIBRE follow the Hebrew sense more closely with "honest men" / "hombres honrados." The Vulgate additionally adds nec ullas molimur insidias ("nor do we contrive any plots"), an expansion not present in the Hebrew or LXX wording of this verse.