Genesis 47:15

Summary

The verse reports that the silver (money) from the land of Egypt and from the land of Canaan came to an end, and all the Egyptians came to Joseph demanding food, asking why they should die before him now that their money is exhausted.

Key words

• yittom ("it was finished", H8552) — qal narrative verb (vav-consecutive), marking the next event in the story: the money's exhaustion is presented as a completed narrative point, not a description.
• kesef ("money/silver", H3701) — masculine singular noun, repeated at the end of the verse (kasef, H3701) to frame the whole speech: the crisis begins and ends with this word.
• havah ("give", H3051) with paragogic he (H9012) — qal imperative with an emphatic final he, intensifying the urgency of the demand rather than simply softening it.
• lammah ("why?", H4100 + preposition le) — interrogative construction opening a rhetorical question about their impending death.
• afes ("it has come to an end", H656) — qal perfect, denoting a completed state ("has ceased to exist"), used here to justify the preceding question with ki ("for", H3588).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of narrative vav-forms (va-yittom, va-yavo'u), which is typical of Biblical Hebrew storytelling: first the money "ends" (yittom), then "all Egypt" (kol-Mitzrayim, using the construct noun kol, H3605) "comes" (yavo'u) to Joseph. The double phrase me'eretz Mitzrayim... u-me'eretz Kena'an ("from the land of Egypt... and from the land of Canaan") specifies that the shortage affects both regions, each introduced by the preposition min (H9006, "from").

The direct speech introduced by le'mor ("saying", H559, infinitive construct) contains two elements: a command and a rhetorical question. The imperative havah carries a paragogic he, a grammatical feature that Hebrew uses to add emphasis to a command; this force is not distinguishable in translations that simply render it as "give us." The question ve-lammah namut negdekha ("why should we die before you") uses the imperfect namut (H4191), which can express future or potential action ("why would we die"), followed by the construct noun neged ("before", H5048) with a second-person suffix, positioning the speakers directly in front of Joseph. The causal clause ki afes kasef closes the speech by restating the initial problem: the perfect verb afes marks this exhaustion as an accomplished fact, distinct from the earlier narrative verb yittom, though both are commonly rendered "ended" or "gone" in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders kol-Mitzrayim ("all Egypt") as πάντες οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι ("all the Egyptians"), making explicit that the people, not the land itself, are the subject — a specification not marked in the Hebrew construct phrase. The Vulgate shifts the syntax by rendering the opening clause as cumque defecisset emptoribus pretium ("and when the price had failed the buyers"), introducing "buyers" (emptoribus), a detail absent from the Hebrew text. The SBLIBRE Spanish version paraphrases the closing rhetorical question as "¿Vas a dejar que nos muramos...?" ("Are you going to let us die...?"), adding an implied agency to Joseph not explicit in the Hebrew interrogative construction lammah namut.