NOTES for Gen 47:1-31

The land that has now become home to Israel and his sons is entrusted by God into Joseph’s hands. The fate of Pharaoh’s subjects, their property, and their land now depends on him. Yet in the story of Joseph and his brothers, the prophecy given to Abraham is repeated several times: the people will live for a long time in a foreign land, but in the end God will lead them to the Promised Land. All the characters in this story are destined to die in Egypt; their children and their children’s children will also die there. But throughout all these years, the promise of the future exodus will live among the people of Israel, later becoming the central thread of the next chapter of Sacred History. Jacob’s request, like Joseph’s after him, to be buried in the “land of the fathers” rests upon this undying hope. The people’s history falls asleep for four hundred years, but the News of the saving God will remain at the center of its life, just as it remains at the center for all participants in God’s History, ancient and modern.