Genesis 44:22

Summary

Genesis 44:22 reports the words spoken to Joseph (called "my lord") explaining that the young man (Benjamin) cannot leave his father, because if he did, the separation would result in the father's death. The verse is presented as reported speech within the narrative, using a chain of verb forms that all point toward a future, conditional outcome.

Key words

• No.mer ("we said", H0559) — qal narrative form; opens the reported speech with a simple past "and we said."
• yu.Khal ("he will be able", H3201) — qal imperfect, marking an ongoing/future incapacity: the boy's inability to leave.
• 'a.Zo ("leave", H5800A) — infinitive construct, functioning as "to leave," completing the verb yu.Khal.
• 'a.Zav ("he will leave", H5800A) — same root as the infinitive, but here a sequential (vav-consecutive) perfect, continuing the future sense begun by the imperfect yu.Khal.
• Met ("he will die", H4191) — sequential perfect, closing the chain of consequence: leaving results in dying.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of three verbal actions linked by the narrative vav: inability (yu.Khal, imperfect), leaving ('a.Zav, sequential perfect), and dying (Met, sequential perfect). In Biblical Hebrew, a sequential perfect following an imperfect continues the same time-frame as the imperfect — here, future or hypothetical time. So although 'a.Zav and Met are morphologically "perfect" (a form often used for completed action), their position in this chain makes them function as future/conditional: "he would leave... and he would die," not "he left... and he died."

The direct object marker 'et (H0853) appears twice before 'a.Vi ("father", H0001G), each time attached to the pronominal suffix -o ("his"), marking "his father" as the definite object of "to leave" and, syntactically, tying the object to the surrounding clause. The Hebrew text does not explicitly repeat "the father" as the subject of Met ("he will die") — the subject is carried only by the third-person suffix on the verb, so the referent (the father, rather than the boy) is understood only through the narrative context established earlier in the speech, not through explicit grammatical marking within this single clause.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ha.Na'ar ("the young man", H5288) as παιδίον ("child"), a slightly younger designation than the Hebrew term suggests. The Vulgate and Spanish/English translations (RV1909, BSB, SBLIBRE) all supply "his father" explicitly as the subject of "would die," making explicit what the Hebrew leaves implicit through the bare verb Met with its pronominal ending alone.