Genesis 45:3

Summary

Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers with the declaration "I am Joseph" and asks whether his father is still alive. The text then states that the brothers were unable to answer him because they were overcome with terror in his presence.

Key words

• ani ("I", H0589) — independent personal pronoun placed before the name Yosef, giving emphatic weight to the self-identification, since Hebrew verbs already encode person and normally would not require a separate pronoun.
• ha ("¿", H9008) — interrogative particle prefixed to od ("still", H5750), marking the clause ha-od avi chai as a question rather than a statement.
• chai ("living", H2416A) — masculine singular adjective functioning as the predicate of the question, describing the state of the father.
• yakhelu ("they were able", H3201) — qal perfect, third person plural, negated by lo ("not", H3808), expressing a completed inability at that narrative moment.
• nivhalu ("they were terrified", H0926) — niphal (passive/reflexive) perfect, indicating that the brothers underwent or experienced the state of terror rather than causing it themselves.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative verb va-yomer ("and he said", H0559), the standard formula introducing direct speech in Hebrew narrative, followed by the subject Yosef and the addressee phrase el-echav ("to his brothers", H0251G with suffix). Joseph's self-identification, ani Yosef, uses the independent pronoun ani even though the verb form is absent (a verbless nominal clause: "I [am] Joseph"), which places grammatical emphasis on the pronoun itself.

The question that follows, ha-od avi chai, is a verbless interrogative clause: the interrogative ha attaches to od ("still"), and the predicate chai ("living") describes avi ("my father", from av, H0001G, with first-person suffix). There is no finite verb "to be" in Hebrew for present-tense predication, so the clause literally reads "still my father living?" — a construction that Hebrew allows but that must be supplied with "is" in translation.

The second half of the verse uses ve-lo yakhelu ("and they were not able") with the infinitive la'anot oto ("to answer him", from anah, H6030B, plus the object marker et with suffix), explaining the brothers' silence. The causal clause ki nivhalu mi-panav ("for they were terrified from his presence/face") uses the niphal stem of bahal (H0926), which marks the brothers as recipients of the terrified state rather than active agents, and panav ("his face/presence", H6440H) with the preposition min ("from", H9006) to indicate the source of that fear.

Differences between versions

The LXX adds material not present in the Hebrew data: it renders Joseph's statement as "I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt" — the phrase "your brother, whom you sold into Egypt" is not reflected in the Hebrew word list given here, where only ani Yosef ("I [am] Joseph") appears. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew structure more closely with "Ego sum Joseph," but renders the causal terror clause as "nimio terrore perterriti" ("terrified by excessive fear"), an intensifying expansion not explicitly present in the Hebrew ki nivhalu mi-panav ("for they were terrified from his presence").