Genesis46chapter 46

Genesis 46:1-2

Beersheba is the last town in the land on the road to Egypt, and Jacob stops there to sacrifice before he crosses out of it. The place is his father's ground, where Abraham swore his oath and planted a grove, and where God appeared to Isaac and named himself the God of Abraham thy father. God answers him in the visions of the night by the old name doubled, Jacob, Jacob, and he answers Here am I.

Genesis 46:3

Three generations stand in three different relations to Egypt. Abram went down under a famine without being told to and came out again only after the LORD plagued Pharaoh, Isaac was forbidden to go down at all and never left the land, and Jacob is sent down with a promise attached. The promise is that the nation will be made in Egypt rather than in Canaan, which is Genesis saying how a household turns into a people.

Genesis 46:4

The going down and the coming up are promised in the same breath, so the Exodus is spoken before the bondage has begun. God keeps the personal half at once, since Joseph is over him when he dies and the body is carried back to Machpelah, and the national half generations later. Matthew takes Hosea's line about God calling his son out of Egypt and applies it to Christ.

Genesis 46:5-6

They go down in the wagons Pharaoh sent, the same wagons that had revived Jacob's spirit when he would not believe his sons. They take their cattle and the goods they had gotten in Canaan, and what they cannot take is any of Canaan itself. All the family owns in the land of promise is a burying field bought at Machpelah for four hundred shekels and a parcel of ground at Shechem, and Hebrews says they died in faith, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Genesis 46:7

The house goes down whole, sons and daughters and grandchildren together, with nobody left behind to hold the ground. Genesis has been narrowing from the start: the generations of the heavens and the earth, then of Adam, then of Noah, then of the nations, and now one family walking into a foreign country. Matthew Henry notes that they went the more willingly because, for all that Canaan had been promised them, they had none of it in possession to this day.

Genesis 46:8-11

The roll opens with Reuben, Jacob's firstborn, and the reader already knows what he did with his father's bed and will hear in chapter 49 that he loses the pre-eminence for it. Simeon and Levi stand next, the two who took Shechem by the sword and are answered for their anger in the same blessing. Shaul is marked as the son of a Canaanitish woman, one of the few mothers named here, and a Canaanite marriage is what set chapter 38 in motion. Exodus opens by repeating this line about the names of the children of Israel which came into Egypt, and starts its own count from it.

Genesis 46:12

Judah's line is the only one in the roll with deaths recorded in it, Er and Onan, who died in the land of Canaan. The sons who carry it are Pharez and Zerah, the twins Tamar bore him after he promised her a kid, sent it, and never got his pledge back. Their birth reversed them, since the hand that came out first wore the scarlet thread and the other child broke through ahead of it, which is the younger set before the elder again after Abel, Isaac and Jacob. Hezron and Hamul are named because the line has to keep going, and Ruth ends by tracing David back to Pharez.

Genesis 46:13-15

Issachar and Zebulun complete Leah's six sons, and her branch is the largest in the count, thirty and three souls of the seventy. She is the wife Jacob did not choose, and the text had said plainly that the LORD opened her womb because she was hated while Rachel stayed barren. Out of her come Levi and Judah, the priesthood and the kingship. Dinah is named in her total, the one daughter of Jacob the book names, and chapter 34 stands behind the naming.

Genesis 46:16-18

Gad and Asher are Zilpah's, and between them they bring sixteen souls, more than Rachel's own line brings. The list keeps saying who gave whom to whom, Zilpah whom Laban gave to Leah and Bilhah whom Laban gave to Rachel, which quietly recalls the twenty years Jacob worked for that man. Serah, Asher's daughter, is the second and last woman named in the roll after Dinah.

Genesis 46:19-22

Rachel alone is called Jacob's wife in the roll, though she has been dead since chapter 35 and Leah bore him twice as many sons. Her two are Joseph and Benjamin, the children of the womb God remembered, and Genesis uses of her there the same word it used of Noah when the waters went down. Joseph's own sons are counted in, born in Egypt to the daughter of a priest of On, and in chapter 48 a blind man will cross his hands over them and say he knows which one he is doing it to.

Genesis 46:23-25

Dan has one son and the text still says sons, which Gill reads as the form the list keeps rather than the trace of a child who died. Bilhah's two sons bring seven souls, and with Zilpah's sixteen that puts nearly a third of the seventy in the line of the two handmaids. Nothing in the count marks them as lesser, and the twelve tribes stand on four mothers.

Genesis 46:26-27

The count is given twice, sixty-six who came out of his loins and seventy for the whole house once Joseph and his two sons are added. Stephen says seventy-five in Acts, following the Greek text, which counts in descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh born in Egypt, and Jerome works the arithmetic through against the Hebrew. Exodus repeats the figure of seventy and then says the children of Israel filled the land, so seventy souls go down and a nation comes up.

Genesis 46:28

Judah goes ahead to have the way pointed to Goshen, and the choice of him is not idle. This is the brother who proposed selling Joseph for silver, and the same man who stood in front of the governor of Egypt and offered to stay a slave in Benjamin's place. Adam Clarke reads the errand as given to him on the strength of that speech, and Genesis keeps putting Judah in front until chapter 49 hands him the sceptre.

Genesis 46:29-30

The governor of Egypt has his chariot made ready in order to drive out to a shepherd, and he weeps on his father's neck a good while. The book opened with one brother killing another, and this last stretch of it keeps spending itself on weeping instead, Joseph on Benjamin's neck, on all his brothers, and now here. Jacob had said he would go down to the grave mourning for this son, and what he says instead is Now let me die, since I have seen thy face. Adam Clarke hears Simeon in the temple saying the same thing over a different child.

Genesis 46:31-32

Joseph goes up to the throne himself and puts his own name behind his brothers before Pharaoh hears a word from them. Matthew Henry sets the two scenes side by side: time was when they were contriving to get rid of him, and now he is contriving to settle them to their advantage. That is the answer he states outright in chapter 50, that they meant evil against him and God meant it unto good.

Genesis 46:33-34

Joseph coaches them to answer the king with the plain fact, that they keep cattle and their fathers kept cattle, and the plain fact is what wins them Goshen. His great-grandfather Abraham and his grandfather Isaac had each stood before a foreign king and shaded the truth about his wife, and each time the king rebuked him for it. Here the truth is told and the land is granted. Being an abomination to the Egyptians is what keeps the household on its own ground, and staying separate is what keeps it a people, which Moses names again when he tells Pharaoh that Israel's sacrifice is the abomination of the Egyptians.