Genesis50chapter 50

Genesis 50:1-3

Joseph falls on his father's face and weeps, and then hands the body to Egyptian physicians, and the text says the physicians embalmed Israel rather than Jacob. Clarke and Jamieson describe the process the numbers fit, forty days for the embalming itself and thirty more before the mourning was done. The man who wrestled for a new name is preserved by Egyptian craft, which is a fair picture of where the family stands at the end of the book.

Genesis 50:4-6

Joseph asks through the house of Pharaoh instead of going himself, and Clarke explains why, since a man in mourning dress did not appear before an eastern king. The request he sends is leave to go up out of Egypt and come again, and Pharaoh answers, Go up, and bury thy father. A later Pharaoh who knew not Joseph will be asked for the same leave to go and will refuse it, and the distance between the two answers is the distance between Genesis and Exodus.

Genesis 50:7-9

The procession is Egyptian before it is Hebrew, since the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of Egypt stand first in the list and the house of Joseph follows them. Chariots and horsemen ride up out of Egypt toward Canaan with Israel rather than after Israel, and the little ones and the flocks stay behind in Goshen as a pledge that the company will come back. Exodus turns both details around, because Moses refuses to leave the little ones or the flocks, and the chariots and horsemen come out behind him.

Genesis 50:10-11

They stop at a threshingfloor beyond Jordan for seven more days of mourning, which is the ordinary Hebrew term laid on top of the seventy Egyptian days. The Canaanites who watch call it a grievous mourning to the Egyptians, so the people of the land read the family carrying the promise as a company of foreigners. Clarke sets out the old dispute over whether Atad is a man's name or the thornbush the word means, and the place keeps the name Abel-mizraim, the mourning of Egypt.

Genesis 50:12-13

Twelve brothers carry one body together, and the book that opened with a brother killing a brother in a field closes with all of them doing a son's work side by side. They bury him at Machpelah, and the writer spends a whole verse saying again that Abraham bought it with the field of Ephron the Hittite. That cave and the parcel at Shechem are the only ground the patriarchs own in the land of promise, and Hebrews says they died in faith without receiving what was promised.

Genesis 50:14

They go up into the land of promise carrying a body and they come back down to Egypt alive, and the whole family is in Egypt when the book stops. Nobody in the chapter treats the return as a problem, since the famine is over and Goshen is good ground. The going up that will matter is four hundred years off, and Genesis ends with Israel outside the country it was promised.

Genesis 50:15-17

Seventeen years after Joseph told them not to be grieved with themselves, the brothers still believe he was only waiting for their father to die. They send a message ahead rather than come themselves, and Clarke weighs whether Jacob really left the charge they report or whether they framed it, and finds the story not unlikely. The word forgive appears here for the first time in the Bible, in a brother's mouth asking a brother, and Joseph weeps when they speak to him.

Genesis 50:18

They fall down before his face and offer themselves as servants, and Gill points out that this finishes the dream of the eleven stars from chapter 37. Genesis states its own rule about doubled dreams at 41:32, that the thing is established by God and he will shortly bring it to pass, and Joseph's boyhood dream was the doubled kind. What they hated him for telling is what they are now doing, and they do it to beg mercy rather than to pay homage.

Genesis 50:19

Joseph refuses the seat the brothers are offering him, and Clarke reads the line either as a question or as a plain statement that the matter now lies between them and God. They came asking a judge for a pardon, and his answer is that he is not the judge. Ephrem the Syrian puts it that although their father has died, the God of their father is still living, and that is the ground on which Joseph will never strike them.

Genesis 50:20-21

One Hebrew verb stands behind both thought and meant, so the sentence lays two intentions on the same act without cancelling either one. Joseph does not soften what they did and he does not hand God the authorship of it, and Sproul notes that their motive left them answerable for it. Then he feeds them, so the man sold by his brothers for silver is nourishing those same brothers and their little ones on the last page of the book.

Genesis 50:22-23

Joseph lives a hundred and ten years and sees Ephraim's line to the third generation, and Machir's children are brought up on his knees. Jacob had crossed his hands over these two boys and set the younger, Ephraim, above Manasseh against Joseph's protest, and it is Ephraim's descendants the text counts first here. Clarke says the household went on acknowledging Joseph as head of the family for as long as he lived, and Numbers will show Machir's clan taking Gilead.

Genesis 50:24-25

Joseph names the Exodus before there is a book called Exodus, and he ties it to the oath sworn to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob rather than to anything Egypt can offer. He is not carried to Canaan now as his father was, but binds the children of Israel by oath to take his bones up when God visits them. Hebrews counts that commandment concerning his bones as the act of his life it calls faith, and Moses carries the bones out at Exodus 13:19 while Joshua records the burial at Shechem, in the parcel Jacob had bought.

Genesis 50:26

The word coffin occurs once in the whole King James Bible, and it is the last thing Genesis says. The book began with the heavens and the earth and has narrowed through eleven divisions of these are the generations down to one embalmed man in a box in a foreign country. Henry notes that Joseph chose a burial in Canaan deferred almost two hundred years over a magnificent one in Egypt, so the coffin holds the promise open rather than shutting it.