16 Judah replied: “What can we say to my lord? How can we plead or how try to prove our innocence? God has uncovered your servants’ guilt. Here we are, then, the slaves of my lord—the rest of us no less than the one in whose possession the goblet was found.”
17 Joseph said, “Far be it from me to act thus! Only the one in whose possession the goblet was found shall become my slave; the rest of you may go back unharmed to your father.”
18 Judah then stepped up to him and said: “I beg you, my lord, let your servant appeal to my lord, and do not become angry with your servant, for you are the equal of Pharaoh.
19 My lord asked his servants, ‘Have you a father, or another brother?’
20 So we said to my lord, ‘We have an aged father, and a younger brother, the child of his old age. This one’s full brother is dead, and since he is the only one by his mother who is left, his father is devoted to him.’
21 Then you told your servants, ‘Bring him down to me that I might see him.’
22 We replied to my lord, ‘The boy cannot leave his father; his father would die if he left him.’