Genesis 47:8

Summary

Pharaoh addresses Jacob directly, asking him a question about his age. The Hebrew phrasing does not ask "how old are you" as a single concept but builds a chain of nouns meaning "how many are the days of the years of your life."

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — narrative vav + qal verb, marking the next event in the sequence: Pharaoh speaking.
• kammah ("how many", H4100 with H9004) — interrogative pronoun prefixed with the preposition ka ("how/like"), forming the question word for quantity.
• yemei ("days of", H3117G) — masculine plural noun in construct state, the first link of a three-noun chain, meaning it cannot stand alone and must be followed by another noun.
• shenei ("years of", H8141) — masculine plural noun, also in construct state, the second link in the chain.
• chayeikha ("your life", H2416E + H9021) — masculine plural noun chayyim ("life") in construct, closed by the second-person masculine singular suffix -kha ("your"), which terminates the chain and supplies the possessor.

What the text says

The clause opens with the standard narrative formula va-yomer Par'oh 'el-Ya'aqov ("and Pharaoh said to Jacob"), using the vav-consecutive verb form that simply advances the story to the next spoken line. The question itself, kammah yemei shenei chayeikha, is built as a triple construct chain: yemei ("days of") governs shenei ("years of"), which in turn governs chayeikha ("your life"). In Biblical Hebrew, a construct chain links nouns so that each earlier noun is grammatically dependent on the one following it, and only the final noun carries the possessive suffix — here -kha ("your"), attached to chayyim ("life"). The literal sense produced by this chain is "how many are the days of the years of your life," a layered expression (days → belonging to years → belonging to your life) rather than a single direct noun like "age." The interrogative kammah itself is formed from the preposition ka ("as/how") plus mah ("what"), functioning here to ask for a numerical quantity.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) renders the line as "Quot sunt dies annorum vitae tuae?" ("How many are the days of the years of your life?"), preserving the same layered construct structure found in the Hebrew (days–years–life). The Septuagint (LXXSWETE) gives "Πόσα ἔτη ἡμερῶν τῆς ζωῆς σου" ("How many years of the days of your life"), which reorders the chain compared to the Hebrew sequence days–years–life. Modern translations such as the BSB ("How many years have you lived?") and SBLIBRE ("¿Cuántos años tiene usted?") collapse the three-noun Hebrew chain into a single simpler question about age, not reproducing the "days of years of life" structure visible in the Hebrew and Vulgate.