Judah Pleads

18Then Judah came near to him and said, “Please, my lord, let your servant speak a word in my lord’s hearing, and do not let your anger burn against your servant, for you are like Pharaoh.”

19My lord asked his servants, saying, ‘Do you have a father or a brother?’

20And we said to my lord, ‘We have an elderly father, and a young son born in his old age. His brother is dead, so he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him.’

21Then you said to your servants, ‘Bring him down to me, that I may set my eyes on him.’

22And we said to my lord, ‘The boy cannot leave his father, for if he should leave his father, he would die.’

23And you said to your servants, ‘If your youngest brother does not come down with you, you shall not continue to see my face.’

24And when we went up to your servant my father, we told him the words of my lord.

25Then our father said, ‘Go back; buy us a little food.’

26But we said, ‘We cannot go down. If our youngest brother is with us, then we will go down, for we cannot see the man's face unless our youngest brother is with us.’

27Then your servant, my father, said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons.’

28One left me, and I said, ‘Surely he has been torn to pieces,’ and I have not seen him until now.

29If you also take this one from me, and harm happens to him, then you will bring my gray hair down to Sheol in misery.

30Now, when I come to your servant my father, and the boy is not with us—his life being bound up with the boy’s life—

31then, when he sees that the boy is not there, he will die, and your servants will bring down the gray hair of your servant our father to Sheol in sorrow.

32For your servant became surety for the boy to my father, saying, ‘If I do not bring him to you, then I will bear the blame before my father all my days.’

33So now, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go up with his brothers.

34For how can I go up to my father if the boy is not with me? Otherwise, I would have to see the disaster that would come upon my father.