³Judah said to him, “The man gave us a severe warning: ‘You won’t be allowed to see me again unless your brother is with you.’ ⁴If you let our brother go with us, we’ll go and buy food for you. ⁵If you won’t let him go, we won’t go. The man said to us, ‘You won’t be allowed to see me again unless your brother is with you.’ ”

⁶Israel asked, “Why have you made trouble for me by telling the man you had another brother?”

⁷They answered, “The man kept asking about us and our family: ‘Is your father still alive? Do you have another brother?’ We simply answered his questions. How could we possibly know he would say, ‘Bring your brother here’?”

⁸Then Judah said to his father Israel, “Send the boy along with me. Let’s get going so that we won’t starve to death. ⁹I guarantee that he will come back. You can hold me responsible for him. If I don’t bring him back to you and place him here in front of you, you can blame me the rest of my life. ¹⁰If we hadn’t waited so long, we could have made this trip twice by now.”

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