NOTES for Gen 47:1-31

The land that has now become home for Israel and his sons has been handed by God into Joseph's hands. The fate of Pharaoh's subjects, their property, and their land now depends on him. But 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 bring them into the Promised Land.

All the heroes of this story are destined to die in Egypt. Their children and their children's children will die there too, but the promise of the future exodus will live in the people of Israel through all these years, so that later it can become the central thread of the next chapter of Sacred History.

Jacob's request, and later Joseph's, to be buried in the "land of the fathers" is based on this undying hope. The history of the people sinks into sleep for four hundred years, but the Message about the saving God will remain the center of its life, just as it remains the center for all participants in God's History, ancient and modern.