Genesis 45:9

Summary

Joseph instructs his brothers to hurry back to their father with a message: they are to report that God has made Joseph lord over all Egypt, and to urge Jacob to come down to him without delay.

Key words

• ma.ha.Ru ("hurry", H4116A) — piel imperative, plural. The piel stem intensifies the action of the root, giving urgency to the command rather than a simple statement of speed.
• sa.Ma.ni ("he has appointed me", H7760A) — qal perfect with 1st person suffix. The perfect aspect marks this as a completed, established fact — Joseph's position is already fixed, not pending.
• 'E.lo.Him ("God", H0430G) — masculine plural noun (used with singular verb agreement here), the grammatical subject who performs the appointing.
• re.Da ("come down", H3381) — qal imperative with paragogic he (H9012), an emphatic ending reinforcing the urgency of the command to descend.
• ta.'a.Mod ("you delay", H5975G) — qal jussive, negated by 'al ("may not", H0408), forming a prohibition softer in form than a flat imperative but functioning as an urgent plea not to linger.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of imperatives and a sequential perfect, typical of direct speech instructions in narrative Hebrew. It opens with two paired commands, ma.ha.Ru ("hurry") and 'a.Lu ("go up", H5927G), both plural imperatives addressed to the brothers, establishing the immediate task: return to the father. This is followed by 'a.mar.Tem ("you will say", H0559), a sequential perfect that continues the command chain — grammatically distinct from a simple future, it functions as "and then you shall say."

The reported speech that follows is introduced by koh 'a.Mar ("thus he says"), a formulaic construction for quoting a message. Within the quotation, Joseph refers to himself in the third person via bin.Kha ("your son", H1121A) before switching to first person with sa.Ma.ni ("he has appointed me"). The perfect tense here presents the appointment by 'E.lo.Him as an accomplished state, not an ongoing process.

The final clause pairs the emphatic imperative re.Da (with paragogic he intensifying it) with the negated jussive 'al ta.'a.Mod — literally "may you not stand/delay." This construction expresses prohibition with a slightly different grammatical texture than a direct negative imperative would.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders lə-'Adon lə-khol Mitzrayim ("lord of all Egypt") as κύριον πάσης γῆς Αἰγύπτου ("lord of all the land of Egypt"), adding "land" (γῆς) not explicit in the Hebrew construct chain kol Mitzrayim. The Vulgate similarly reads "dominum universae terrae Aegypti," matching the LXX's addition of "land/terrae" rather than following the Hebrew's direct "all Egypt."