Commentaire sur La Genèse 44:4

יצאו את העיר, similar to Joshua 6,7 עברו את העיר, “go through the city,” or Exodus 9,29 כצאתי את העיר, “when I leave the city.” A similar construction with pronoun ending instead is found in Jeremiah 10,20 בני יצאוני, “my children have left me.” [the point is the construction in the accusative, with or without the word את. Ed.]

הם יצאו את העיר, the word את in this verse means “from.” A similar construction is found in Exodus 9,29 כצאתי את העיר, “when I leave the boundaries of the city.”

הם יצאו את העיר, לא הרחיקו, “They had left the city, and had not traveled a great distance, etc.” The words את העיר mean the same as מן העיר, from the city. Alternately, the meaning of the phrase is “although they had departed they had not yet traveled far from the city.” The reason was that that the pursuers could not afford to let them get far away before arresting them, as they were known to be brave warriors and once outside the urban area they would simply kill their pursuers in self defense.

הם יצאו את העיר, “when they had barely left the gates of the city,” not having covered any distance as yet. Joseph had reasoned that once they had reached beyond a certain distance it would be impossible to exercise any control over them [without violence. Ed.] as they had been compared to wild beasts. (Compare Yaakov’s blessing of Yehudah in Genesis 49 9 where he compared Yehudah alone to a ferocious lion.) In verse 21 in that chapter the tribe of Naftali is described by Yaakov as a hind let loose, suggesting again that militarily the sons of Yaakov were feared by their contemporaries. They would inspire fear in their adversaries.

לאשר על ביתו, “to the manager of his household;” according to a comment in B’reshit Rabbah, this was Menashe, Joseph’s older son, and seeing that the brothers rent their garments on account of the false accusations leveled at them by Menashe, the latter’s ancestral territory in the land of Israel was also torn apart, most of it being on the east bank of the river Jordan.

הרחיקו, a verb in the intransitive mode. A similar construction of the same verb occurs in Judges 18,22 המה הרחיקו מבית מיכה, “they had traveled a certain distance from the house of Micah.”

והשגתם, hurry in order that you catch up with them.