Genesis 45:17

Summary

Pharaoh instructs Joseph to relay a message to his brothers: they are to load their pack animals and travel to the land of Canaan. The verse is entirely reported speech, framed by a chain of imperative verbs that mark successive commands.

Key words

• emor ("say", H0559) — qal imperative, 2nd person masculine singular, addressed to Joseph; opens the command Pharaoh wants relayed.
• asu ("do", H6213A) — qal imperative, 2nd person masculine plural, directed at the brothers through Joseph's mouth: "do this."
• ta'anu ("load", H2943) — qal imperative, masculine plural, governing the direct object be'irkhem ("your animals", H1165 + H9026), a construct form meaning "the animal[s] of you."
• lekhu ("go", H1980G) and vo'u ("go/enter", H0935G) — two consecutive qal imperatives, masculine plural, joined by the conjunction u ("and", H9002); the doubling intensifies the instruction to depart and arrive.
• artzah ("towards the land", H0776G + H9011) — construct noun with the directional he suffix, indicating motion toward Canaan without needing a separate preposition "to."

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative va-yomer ("and he said", H0559), a standard storytelling formula that moves the plot forward. Pharaoh speaks el-Yosef ("to Joseph", H3130G), and his speech is structured as a nested command: Joseph is told emor ("say", imperative singular) to his brothers, and inside that reported speech come the plural imperatives meant for the brothers themselves — asu ("do"), ta'anu ("load"), lekhu ("go"), vo'u ("go/come"). This layering (singular imperative to Joseph, plural imperatives for the brothers) shows grammatically that Pharaoh's words are relayed through an intermediary rather than addressed directly.

The phrase lekhu-vo'u stacks two motion verbs without an intervening object, a construction that in Hebrew narrative typically emphasizes the sequence of departing and then arriving, rather than describing two separate actions. The destination is marked not by a preposition but by the directional he attached to artzah ("towards the land"), a common Hebrew device for indicating goal of motion, here reinforced by the construct relationship with Kena'an ("Canaan", H3667A).

Differences between versions

The Vulgate converts the direct speech into indirect speech: "ut imperaret fratribus suis, dicens" ("that he should command his brothers, saying"), whereas the Hebrew and the LXX preserve direct discourse beginning with emor / Εἰπὸν ("say"). The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew imperatives lekhu-vo'u ("go, go/enter") with a single verb, ἀπέλθατε ("depart"), collapsing the two-verb sequence into one action. The LXX also translates be'irkhem ("your animals", H1165) as τὰ πόρια ὑμῶν ("your pack-beasts/vessels"), while the Vulgate's "jumenta" ("beasts of burden") stays closer to the Hebrew sense of animals used for carrying loads.