Genesis 48:8

Summary

The verse narrates a two-step action: Israel (Jacob) sees the sons of Joseph, then asks who they are. The Hebrew uses two consecutive narrative verbs — "he saw" and "he said" — to mark the sequence of perception followed by speech.

Key words

• vayyar ("he saw", H7200G) — qal narrative verb; the vav-consecutive form ties this action directly to the following action as the next event in the story sequence.
• Yisra'el ("Israel", H3478) — proper name, subject of both verbs in the verse.
• benei ("sons of", H1121A) — masculine plural noun in construct state, grammatically bound to the following name so that "sons" and "Joseph" form a single possessive unit ("sons of Joseph").
• vayyomer ("he said", H0559) — qal narrative verb; parallel in form to vayyar, continuing the same narrative chain and introducing direct speech.
• mi ("who?", H4310) — interrogative pronoun opening the direct question, attached with a maqqef to elleh.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs, vayyar ("he saw") and vayyomer ("he said"), both with Israel as subject. This construction presents the seeing and the speaking as sequential events within the narrative flow, a pattern typical of Biblical Hebrew storytelling where each new clause begins with "and then." The object of the seeing is marked explicitly by the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) before benei Yosef ("sons of Joseph"), a construct phrase where benei ("sons of") is grammatically dependent on Yosef ("Joseph"), naming Joseph directly as the reference point.

The question itself, mi 'elleh ("who [are] these?"), is a minimal interrogative clause: the interrogative pronoun mi joined by a maqqef to the demonstrative 'elleh ("these"), with no verb "to be" needed in Hebrew — the copula is implied. The question contains no explicit addressee marker in the Hebrew text itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the question as "τίνες σοι οὗτοι" ("who are these to you?"), adding the dative pronoun σοι ("to you"), an element with no counterpart in the Hebrew mi 'elleh. The LXX also uses a participial construction ("ἰδὼν... Ἰσραὴλ... εἶπεν," "Israel, having seen... said") rather than two parallel finite verbs as in the Hebrew.

The Vulgate renders "τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰωσήφ" / benei Yosef as "filios ejus" ("his sons"), replacing the explicit name "Joseph" with a possessive pronoun. The Vulgate also adds "ad eum" ("to him") after "dixit," specifying an addressee not present in the Hebrew vayyomer mi 'elleh.