Genesis49chapter 49

Genesis 49:1-2

Jacob calls the twelve together and says he will tell them what shall befall them in the last days, and that phrase occurs here for the first time in Scripture. What follows is the longest speech in Genesis, poetry from the second verse to the twenty-seventh, and it speaks about tribes rather than only about the twelve men standing in the room. Genesis divides itself eleven times by the words these are the generations of, and the last of those divisions opened at 37:2 with the generations of Jacob, so a book that began with the heavens and the earth closes by naming one family tribe by tribe.

Genesis 49:3-4

Reuben is handed the full titles of the firstborn, my might, the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power, and loses all of it in the next breath for being unstable as water. The reason is the single verse at 35:22, which the narrator reported at the time without a word of comment, and the account is settled here at the end of Jacob's life. Genesis has been setting the younger over the elder since Abel, and this is the most deliberate of those turns, because the firstborn is named as firstborn and told what he forfeited before the birthright moves.

Genesis 49:5-7

Simeon and Levi are taken together because they acted together at Shechem in chapter 34, and Jacob refuses to be counted with them, come not thou into their secret. He curses their anger and their wrath rather than the two men themselves, and the older commentators keep pointing at that distinction. The sentence on both is the same, I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel, and Levi's scattering later turns into the priesthood living in cities scattered among all the tribes.

Genesis 49:8-9

With the first three sons set aside, what belonged to the firstborn falls to the fourth. The words given him, thy father's children shall bow down before thee, are the words of Joseph's dream at 37:7-10, and here they are said over Judah, the brother who proposed selling Joseph at 37:26 and who then offered himself in Benjamin's place at 44:33. Judah is called a lion's whelp and an old lion that no one will rouse, and Revelation 5:5 names Christ the Lion of the tribe of Judah, which is the New Testament making that link itself.

Genesis 49:10

The sceptre and the lawgiver stay with Judah until Shiloh come, and the word Shiloh carries more than one reading. Gill and Henry take it as a title of the Messiah, a second reading follows the Hebrew as until he come to whom it belongs, which is the sense Ezekiel 21:27 uses, and a third points to the town of Shiloh where the tabernacle stood after Joshua. Every reading sets a term on Judah's rule, and the line that rule runs through goes back to chapter 38, since Ruth 4:18-22 traces David from Pharez, the younger twin born to the woman Judah had wronged.

Genesis 49:11-12

The picture is a country so thick with vines that a man ties his donkey to one and thinks nothing of it, and washes his clothes in wine because there is that much of it. A garment washed in the blood of grapes falls in a family whose garments have carried blood and disguise before, Joseph's coat dipped in a kid's blood at 37:31, and the widow's clothes Tamar laid aside at 38:14 so that Judah would not know her. Isaiah 63:1-3 later sets a figure in garments stained red from a winepress, and the Gospels record Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of an ass.

Genesis 49:13-15

Zebulun is given the sea and a border reaching toward Zidon, and Issachar a strong ass couching down between two burdens. The two sayings sit against each other, one tribe facing outward at the harbours and the other bowing its shoulder to bear and becoming a servant unto tribute for the sake of a pleasant land. Jacob is describing settled character rather than a single act, and each saying can be laid beside what that tribe actually became once Joshua divided the land.

Genesis 49:16-18

Dan is promised that he shall judge his people, and Samson the Danite is the judge the history gives. Then the image turns to a serpent by the way and an adder in the path that bites the horse heels, and the word serpent has not been a neutral word in this book since chapter 3. In the middle of it Jacob breaks off and says, I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD, which is the first time the word salvation appears in Scripture, spoken by a dying man in the middle of a sentence about a snake.

Genesis 49:19-21

Three short sayings run together here and each one turns on a single image. Gad is overcome by a troop and overcomes at the last, which reads like a border tribe that keeps losing ground and taking it back. Asher yields royal dainties out of fat bread, and Naphtali is a hind let loose that giveth goodly words, the only one of the twelve whose blessing is about speech.

Genesis 49:22-24

Joseph is given a bough by a well whose branches run over the wall, a picture of fruit that will not stay inside the boundary it was planted in. Then come the archers who have sorely grieved him and shot at him and hated him, which is his brothers and Potiphar's house and the prison told back to him in one line. His bow abode in strength by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob, and the aside that follows names God the shepherd and the stone of Israel, which Gill and Henry both read of Christ.

Genesis 49:25-26

The blessings pile up in four directions, heaven above, the deep that lieth under, the breasts and the womb, and Jacob says his own blessings have prevailed above the blessings of his progenitors. That is a claim about Abraham and Isaac, and it is made by the man who bought a birthright with a pot of soup and took a blessing while wearing his brother's clothes. The crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren is Joseph, the eleventh son, who receives the double portion of the firstborn through Ephraim and Manasseh in chapter 48.

Genesis 49:27-28

Benjamin, the youngest son and the one Jacob would not let out of his sight in chapter 42, is given a single line and it is a wolf tearing prey morning and evening. The history that answers to it runs through Judges 20 and through Ehud, Saul, and the Benjamite of Tarsus who was breathing out threatenings in Acts 9:1. The summary then says all these are the twelve tribes of Israel and that every one was blessed according to his blessing, which covers the sayings that read as sentences as well as the ones that read as gifts.

Genesis 49:29-30

The poetry stops and the last instruction Jacob gives is about a grave. He names the cave in the field of Machpelah and says plainly that Abraham bought it, with the field, of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a buryingplace. That cave and a parcel of ground at Shechem are the only land the three patriarchs ever own in the country promised to them, which is what Hebrews 11:13 means by saying they died in faith not having received the promises.

Genesis 49:31-32

Jacob lists everyone already lying there, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and then Leah, and the last name comes in his own voice, there I buried Leah. Rachel is not on the list, because she was buried on the road to Ephrath at 35:19, so the wife he had not chosen is the one who lies beside him. The final word on the field is a legal one, that the purchase was from the children of Heth, the same care chapter 23 took to buy the ground in the open in front of witnesses.

Genesis 49:33

He makes an end of commanding his sons, gathers up his feet into the bed, and yields up the ghost, which is a man setting his house in order and then lying down. Jacob dies in Egypt, and the household around him is the one that went down at 46:3-4 with God's promise that he would surely bring them up again. His last order points the whole family back to Canaan, and the next chapter is the funeral procession that carries him there.