Genesis47chapter 47

Genesis 47:1-4

Joseph goes ahead to report the family's arrival and then presents five of the brothers, who ask only to sojourn in the land rather than to settle in it. That is the word Abraham used of himself in Canaan when he called himself a stranger and a sojourner, and it keeps the family lodgers in Egypt rather than citizens of it. Joseph had told them in the previous chapter to name their trade with the cattle so that Goshen would be given them, since every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians, and the contempt of the country is what keeps Israel in a corner of it and unmixed.

Genesis 47:5-6

Pharaoh answers Joseph rather than the brothers, gives them the best of the land without being asked for it, and offers the ablest among them charge over his own cattle. Israel enters Egypt as honoured guests holding the finest ground in the country by royal grant. Exodus opens on the same family in the same place under a king who knew not Joseph, and by then the grant has become slavery.

Genesis 47:7-8

A wandering shepherd is set before the king of Egypt and blesses him, and the writer of Hebrews states the rule that the less is blessed of the greater. Pharaoh asks him nothing about his trade or his God, only how old he is, which suggests what the old man's face showed. Matthew Henry notes that Pharaoh was the greater in worldly wealth while Jacob was the greater in interest with God.

Genesis 47:9-10

Jacob answers with the word pilgrimage, which enters the Bible here and which Hebrews takes up when it calls the patriarchs strangers and pilgrims on the earth who died without receiving the promises. He calls his hundred and thirty years few and evil and short of his fathers, and the numbers bear him out, since Abraham reached a hundred and seventy five and Isaac a hundred and eighty. He blesses Pharaoh a second time on the way out, so the audience opens and closes with the poorer man giving.

Genesis 47:11-12

The word for the possession Joseph gives them is the word Genesis used of Machpelah, the field Abraham bought for four hundred shekels and the only ground he ever owned in the land of promise. The family's first secure holding is in Egypt, and it is better land than anything their fathers held in Canaan. Jacob answers that at the end of this chapter by making Joseph swear not to bury him in it.

Genesis 47:13-15

The seven lean years arrive exactly as Pharaoh's two dreams said they would, and Genesis had already given its own reason for the doubling, that the thing is established by God and he will shortly bring it to pass. Joseph gathers all the money in Egypt and in Canaan into Pharaoh's house, and then the money simply fails. Everything the chapter does next follows from a currency that has stopped working.

Genesis 47:16-19

The exchange runs in stages, money first, then livestock that could not be fed anyway, and last of all land and bodies. Adam Clarke notes that taking the cattle preserved both the herds and the people, since a household with no grain would otherwise have divided its own bread with its animals. The final stage is proposed by the Egyptians rather than imposed on them, in the words buy us and our land for bread, and nobody in the chapter is compelled.

Genesis 47:20-21

Joseph buys an entire country for the king he serves, while the family whose God promised them Canaan owns a parcel at Shechem and a burial cave in it. Hebrews says they died in faith, not having received the promises, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Joseph then moves the population into the cities, which Adam Clarke reads as the practical step of bringing the people to where the grain was already stored.

Genesis 47:22-24

The priests keep their land because Pharaoh already fed them, which Adam Clarke calls the earliest record of a religion supported by the state. Origen set that beside Israel's arrangement, where the LORD grants his priests no land at all and tells them instead that he himself is their portion. Egypt renders a fifth part to the throne, and Israel will render a tenth to God.

Genesis 47:25-26

The people who have just sold themselves say thou hast saved our lives and ask to find grace in his sight, which is how men speak to a deliverer rather than to a creditor. Readers from Origen through Matthew Henry took Joseph here as a figure of Christ, the one man holding bread when nobody else has any, buying a people for his lord and handing them back their fields with seed to sow. The New Testament never calls Joseph a type, so that is what those writers saw in the story rather than a claim the apostles make.

Genesis 47:27

A nation that has just sold its land and its bodies to the crown stands beside a family that has possessions and grows and multiplies exceedingly. That sentence is the one Exodus opens on, and the arrangement reverses inside a few generations, with Egypt free and Israel in bondage. God had told Abraham his seed would be strangers in a land not theirs for four hundred years, and told Jacob on the road down that he would make of him a great nation there.

Genesis 47:28

Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years: Jacob is given seventeen years in Egypt, and Joseph was seventeen when his father sent him out to his brothers and lost him. John Wesley set the two numbers side by side: seventeen years Jacob nourished Joseph, and now seventeen years Joseph nourished Jacob. The whole hundred and forty seven is counted out here because the book is closing the account on him.

Genesis 47:29-30

Jacob asks for the oath in the form Abraham had used once, with the hand under the thigh, and that oath was also about refusing to let the family be absorbed by the country it lived among. He will not take a grave in the best land in Egypt, because the promise was fastened to a different country and to a field his grandfather had paid for. John Wesley read the request as faith rather than homesickness, a way of keeping hold of the land of promise until his descendants should own it.

Genesis 47:31

The last line of the chapter turns on three Hebrew consonants that can be pointed as bed or as staff, and the two readings have stood beside each other since antiquity. Jerome argued for the bed and read the act as Jacob worshipping God at its head, while the Greek Old Testament read the staff, and Hebrews follows the Greek when it lists this moment among the acts of faith. Either way the dying man worships as soon as the oath is sworn, and Hebrews counts the worship rather than the furniture.