Genesis 42:36

Summary

Jacob responds to his sons' report by accusing them of having taken away his children: Joseph and Simeon are already lost, and now they want to take Benjamin too. He frames all these losses as things happening "against him."

Key words

• shikkaltem ("you are making childless", H7921A) — piel perfect, 2nd person masculine plural. The piel stem intensifies the action (causing bereavement), and the perfect aspect marks it as a completed act from Jacob's perspective.
• 'oti ("me", H0853+H9030) — direct object marker with 1st person suffix, placed before the verb shikkaltem, fronting "me" for emphasis: "me you have bereaved."
• 'einennu ("not is he", H0369+H9030) — construct noun of negation with pronominal suffix, an idiomatic way of saying "he is no more" or "he does not exist [here]." It appears twice, once for Joseph and once for Simeon.
• tiqqachu ("you will take", H3947G) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, expressing an action seen as ongoing or about to happen, contrasted with the completed shikkaltem.
• kullanah ("all of them", H3605+H9029) — construct noun with a feminine plural suffix (-nah), even though the entities discussed (Joseph, Simeon, Benjamin) are grammatically masculine; the feminine plural here functions idiomatically to refer to the collective situation or "all these things."

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative formula va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) introducing Jacob's direct speech to his sons, identified as 'aleihem Ya'aqov 'avihem — "to them, Jacob their father." The accusation begins with the object 'oti placed before the verb shikkaltem, a word-order choice that puts "me" in emphatic first position: the grammatical structure highlights Jacob as the one affected before naming the action done to him.

The two parallel clauses Yosef 'einennu and ve-Shim'on 'einennu use the same negative-existential construction back to back, creating a rhythmic repetition — "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not" — which the perfect verb shikkaltem has already framed as the result of what has happened to Jacob. The following clause shifts to the imperfect tiqqachu ("you will take") for Benjamin, marking a distinction between what has already occurred (completed loss) and what is anticipated (a future or ongoing taking). The closing phrase 'alai hayu kullanah ("upon me they were, all of them") uses the perfect hayu ("they were", H1961) and the feminine-suffixed kullanah to summarize the cumulative weight of these events on Jacob, without the feminine form corresponding to any explicit feminine antecedent in the sentence.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the clause about Simeon as "Simeon tenetur in vinculis" ("Simeon is held in bonds"), adding a specific detail (imprisonment) not present in the Hebrew Shim'on 'einennu ("Simeon is not") or in the LXX, which reads Symeōn ouk estin ("Simeon is not"), closely matching the Hebrew construction.