Genesis48chapter 48

Genesis 48:1-2

The chapter opens with Jacob confined to his bed, where a chapter earlier he had made Joseph swear about his burial. He is called Jacob when the message reaches him and Israel when he gathers his strength and sits up, and the text trades the two names through the whole scene. Hebrews picks this deathbed out as the act of faith Jacob is remembered for and describes him worshipping on the top of his staff, which is the reading Clarke argues against from this verse, holding that a bed and not a staff is meant.

Genesis 48:3-4

Before he gives anything away he recites what he was given, going back to the stone and the ladder at Luz in chapter 28 and to the second appearing at the same place in chapter 35. The name he uses is God Almighty, the name under which the covenant was cut with Abraham in chapter 17. What he quotes is fruitfulness and the land as an everlasting possession, and he quotes it from a bed in Egypt with none of that land in his hand.

Genesis 48:5-6

Jacob adopts his two grandsons as his own and ranks them with Reuben and Simeon, the firstborn and the second. That hands Joseph the double portion of a firstborn through his sons, and Chronicles later states the reason flatly, that Reuben forfeited the birthright and it went to the sons of Joseph. Any children born to Joseph after these stay under their brothers' names, so the adoption is exact and does not run on.

Genesis 48:7

He explains the adoption by reaching back to the road near Ephrath where Rachel died bearing her second son. She had been barren until God remembered her, which is the same wording the book uses of Noah in the ark, and she bore only two sons before that road took her. Taking Joseph's two sons as his own turns her short line into three tribes. The writer adds that the burial place is Bethlehem, and Rachel is the one patriarch's wife who does not lie in the cave at Machpelah.

Genesis 48:8-10

His eyes are dim for age and he has to ask which boys are standing in front of him, which is exactly where his own father stood in chapter 27. Isaac's dim eyes let a younger son be passed off as the elder by a trick with a garment. Jacob's dim eyes are about to set a younger son first on purpose, and he will say so out loud within ten verses. He kisses and embraces two grandsons he had no expectation of ever meeting.

Genesis 48:11-12

The last thing of Joseph's that Jacob handled was a coat brought home dipped in the blood of a kid, and he refused to be comforted over it. That deception ran on the pattern he had used himself, since he took his father's blessing wearing a garment and the skins of two kids. Now he holds the son he had buried in his own mind, and the grandsons besides, and Joseph bows his face to the earth in front of a blind old man.

Genesis 48:13-14

Joseph places the boys so that the elder falls under the right hand and the younger under the left, which is the arrangement any father would expect. Jacob crosses his arms over them, and the text says he guided his hands wittingly, so the crossing is a decision and not the fumbling of a man who cannot see. Clarke notes that this is the first place in Scripture where hands are laid on a head to bless, a gesture that afterwards runs through ordination and sacrifice.

Genesis 48:15

The blessing is spoken over Joseph and falls on the boys, and it names God three times over in three separate clauses. The first names him by the fathers who walked before him, which puts two boys born in Egypt into a line that starts in Ur. The verb behind fed is the shepherd's word, so the man who kept Laban's flocks for twenty years is saying that he was the sheep the whole time.

Genesis 48:16

This is the first time the canon uses the word redeem, and the Hebrew behind it is goel, the near kinsman whose right it is to buy back a forfeited inheritance. A dying man uses it of his own life, looking back over Esau, Laban, Shechem and the twenty two years he believed Joseph was dead. Clarke stops here and asks directly of whom Jacob is speaking, and Henry reads the Angel as Christ, the Angel of the covenant. Jacob then asks that his own name be named on the boys, so they carry Israel rather than the standing their father holds in Egypt.

Genesis 48:17-18

Joseph is displeased and takes hold of his father's hand to move it, assuming that a blind man has made a mistake. The son who was himself set over ten elder brothers is arguing here for the plain rights of the firstborn. He says Not so, my father, which is the seeing man correcting the blind one about what is happening in the room.

Genesis 48:19

The refusal is flat and it is repeated, which turns the crossed hands from an error into a stated intention. This is the sixth time in Genesis that the younger goes before the elder, after Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Pharez over Zarah, and Joseph over Reuben in this same chapter. Paul takes the Jacob and Esau case up in Romans and reads it as a choice that does not run by birth order. The man refusing had once taken a blessing by pretending to be the elder, and he now gives one to the younger with his eyes shut and his mind clear.

Genesis 48:20

The blessing becomes a form of words, and Clarke reports that Jewish families in his own day still prayed God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh over their sons, with Sarah and Rebekah named the same way over their daughters. The closing clause states the reversal without argument, that he set Ephraim before Manasseh. The prophets afterwards use Ephraim as the name of the whole northern kingdom, which is where the crossed hands end up on the map.

Genesis 48:21

He states his own death without ceremony and then hands over the one thing his family will need in Egypt, that God will bring them back up to the land. That is the promise given to him at Beersheba on the way down, when God told him not to fear to go into Egypt and said he would surely bring him up again. Joseph repeats it on his own deathbed two chapters later and makes them swear about his bones, and Moses carries those bones out at the exodus.

Genesis 48:22

The word behind one portion is shechem, a shoulder, and Jerome, Henry and Clarke all read it as the town of Shechem and the parcel of ground Jacob had bought there for a hundred pieces of money. He says he took it with his sword and his bow, which Genesis nowhere narrates, and the older writers work at the distance between the purchase and the claim. That parcel and the cave at Machpelah are the only ground the patriarchs own in the land of promise, and one of the two is a grave. Joshua records Joseph's bones buried in that plot, and John sets Jesus at the same piece of ground asking a Samaritan woman for a drink.