Scriptures

New Living Translation (NLT)

Genesis 42
³⁶ Jacob exclaimed, “You are robbing me of my children! Joseph is gone! Simeon is gone! And now you want to take Benjamin, too. Everything is going against me!”
³⁷ Then Reuben said to his father, “You may kill my two sons if I don’t bring Benjamin back to you. I’ll be responsible for him, and I promise to bring him back.”
³⁸ But Jacob replied, “My son will not go down with you. His brother Joseph is dead, and he is all I have left. If anything should happen to him on your journey, you would send this grieving, white-haired man to his grave.”
Genesis 43
¹ But the famine continued to ravage the land of Canaan.
² When the grain they had brought from Egypt was almost gone, Jacob said to his sons, “Go back and buy us a little more food.”
³ But Judah said, “The man was serious when he warned us, ‘You won’t see my face again unless your brother is with you.’
⁴ If you send Benjamin with us, we will go down and buy more food.
⁵ But if you don’t let Benjamin go, we won’t go either. Remember, the man said, ‘You won’t see my face again unless your brother is with you.’”
⁶ “Why were you so cruel to me?” Jacob moaned. “Why did you tell him you had another brother?”
⁷ “The man kept asking us questions about our family,” they replied. “He asked, ‘Is your father still alive? Do you have another brother?’ So we answered his questions. How could we know he would say, ‘Bring your brother down here’?”
⁸ Judah said to his father, “Send the boy with me, and we will be on our way. Otherwise we will all die of starvation—and not only we, but you and our little ones.