Genesis 50:1

Summary

Genesis 50:1 narrates Joseph's immediate reaction to his father's death: he falls upon his father's face, weeps over him, and kisses him. The verse consists of three sequential actions linked by narrative verb forms, all performed by Joseph as subject.

Key words

• yipol ("he fell", H5307G) — qal narrative verb; the vav-consecutive form marks this as the first event in the sequence, establishing the physical gesture of falling upon the body.
• penei ("face of", H6440H) — masculine plural noun in construct state, meaning it must be followed by another noun to complete its meaning ("face of X"); here it links to avi.
• avi ("my father" / with suffix "his father", H0001G) — masculine singular noun in construct state, receiving the 3rd person suffix -v ("his"), producing "his father."
• yevek ("he wept", H1058) — qal narrative verb, second action in the chain, introduced by the same vav-consecutive pattern as the first verb.
• yishak ("he kissed", H5401A) — qal narrative verb, third and final action; followed by the preposition l- ("to") with suffix -o ("him"), forming the object of the kissing.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of three narrative clauses, each introduced by the vav-consecutive prefix (va-), a grammatical feature that signals sequential past action: "and he fell... and he wept... and he kissed." This structure creates a rapid succession of gestures without pause, all performed by the single subject Yosef ("Joseph", H3130G), named only once at the start of the sentence and understood as the implicit subject of the following two verbs.

The phrase al-penei avi ("upon the face of his father") uses the construct chain penei avi, where penei ("face of", H6440H) is grammatically bound to avi ("father", H0001G) plus the possessive suffix. This construct construction is common in Biblical Hebrew for expressing "the face of X" and does not by itself specify whether the father is alive or dead — that information comes from the broader narrative context, not from this verse's grammar alone.

The final action, yishak-lo ("he kissed him"), uses the preposition l- ("to", H9005) with the suffix -o ("him") rather than a direct object marker, a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew for the verb "to kiss" (nashak, root of yishak).

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) renders the first verb with ruit ("he rushed/fell"), paired with participles flens ("weeping") and deosculans ("kissing fervently") rather than three parallel finite verbs as in the Hebrew's narrative chain. The Spanish SBLIBRE renders yipol as "se abrazó" ("he embraced"), differing from the more literal "fell" found in BSB and RV1909 ("se echó").