Genesis 45:14

Summary

The verse describes a mutual embrace: the (unnamed but contextually Joseph) subject falls on the neck of his brother Benjamin and weeps, and then Benjamin weeps on his neck. The Hebrew text uses two different verb forms for "weep," creating a subtle temporal distinction between the two actions.

Key words

• va-yippol ("and he fell", H5307G) — qal narrative verb; the vav-consecutive form marks this as the next event in the story sequence, describing a physical act of falling/throwing oneself onto someone.
• tzavvərei ("neck of", H6677A) — masculine plural noun in construct state; being in construct, it must be followed by the name it belongs to (Benjamin), literally "necks of Benjamin his brother."
• va-yevk ("and he wept", H1058) — qal narrative form (vav-consecutive); continues the narrative chain, presenting this weeping as the immediate next event after the falling.
• bakhah ("he wept", H1058) — same root as above but in the perfect (qatal) form rather than narrative form; this shifts from the narrative chain to a completed-action statement about Benjamin's weeping.
• achi ("brother of", H0251G) — masculine singular noun in construct, requiring the following pronominal suffix -o ("his") to complete the phrase "his brother."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure moves through a chain of narrative verbs (va-yippol, va-yevk) using vav-consecutive forms, which is the standard mechanism in Biblical Hebrew narrative for sequencing events: "and he fell... and he wept." This chain describes the unnamed subject (identifiable from context as Joseph) embracing Benjamin's neck and weeping.

The second half of the verse shifts grammatical construction: instead of continuing the vav-consecutive chain, the text uses u-Vinyamin bakhah — the conjunction u- ("and") plus the subject Benjamin placed before the verb, with the verb in the perfect (qatal) form bakhah rather than the narrative form. This word-order shift (subject before verb) combined with the change in verb form marks a distinction from simple sequential narration; grammatically it sets Benjamin's weeping apart from the preceding narrative chain rather than presenting it as merely the next link in the same sequence.

The word tzavvərei ("necks of") appears in the plural construct form both times, followed by the person whose neck is described (Vinyamin achiv, "Benjamin his brother" in the first instance; the pronominal suffix "his" in the second, referring back to the first subject).

Differences between versions

The LXX explicitly names the subject as absent in the Hebrew clause — it reads ἐπιπεσὼν ("having fallen") and adds ἐπέπεσεν ἐπ' αὐτῷ ("he fell upon him"), an additional verb not present in the Hebrew text, which only has one "falling" verb (va-yippol). The Vulgate uses amplexatus ("having embraced"), introducing the specific concept of embracing, which is not explicit in the Hebrew verb naphal ("to fall," here as yippol) — the Hebrew verb denotes falling/throwing oneself rather than embracing per se. The BSB translation similarly interprets the Hebrew "falling on the neck" as "threw his arms around," an interpretive rendering not literally present in the Hebrew verb itself.