Comentario sobre Génesis 46:26

כל הנפש הבאה ליעקב EVERY SOUL THAT WAS COMING WITH JACOB — every soul that left Canaan to go to Egypt The word הבאה, here, is not a perfect tense, but a participle with a relative present sense — just as (Ester 2:4) “In the evening she (באה) was coming” and (Genesis 29:7) “and, behold, Rachel his daughter is coming (באה)” and therefore the accent is on the last syllable, on the א, because when they left, coming from the land of Canaan, they were only sixty-six. But at the second mention of this word (Genesis 46:27) — “every soul of the house of Jacob, which came (הבאה) into Egypt were seventy” — it is a perfect tense and therefore it is accented on the last but one syllable, on the ב. The reason is, that when they came there, they were seventy, for they found Joseph and his two sons there, and Jochebed was added to their number “between the walls”. According to the view of the Rabbi (i. e. R. Jehudah, cf. Genesis Rabbah 84) who stated that with each of Jacob’s sons a twin-sister was born, we must say that these died before they (Jacob and his family) went down to Egypt, because they are not enumerated here. In Vayikra Rabbah 4:6 I found the following: When he left Canaan (cf. Genesis 36:6) Esau’s family consisted of only six (himself and his five sons), and Scripture calls them “the souls of his house” (in the plural) and this is because they worshipped many gods (each serving a different god and having as it were, a different soul or religious feeling). But the family of Jacob when he came to Egypt consisted of seventy and Scripture calls them “soul”, in the singular, because they all served One God.

(1) [ALL THE PERSONS WHO CAME WITH YA'AKOV TO EGYPT] HIS OWN ISSUE. Who are coming to Egypt.

כל הנפש הבאה, we are told about number of the members of Yaakov’s household appearing with the masculine ending twice, such as the number fourteen in verse 22, and the number seven in verse 25. On the other hand, in verse 15 the Torah uses the feminine ending for the number 33 (שלושים ושלוש) and in verse 18 it uses the feminine ending for the number 16 (שש עשרה). The reason for this apparent anomaly is that the noun נפש mentioned in verse 26, for instance is feminine, hence the number associated with that noun has to be in the feminine mode also. The word בני being in the masculine mode, however, determines that the adjective or attribute accompanying it be in the same mode, i.e. masculine.