NOTES for Gen 46:1-34
Joseph settles his father and all his brothers where most of the Semitic tribes that came to Egypt during the Hyksos invasion lived in those days: in the land of Goshen (Gesem), in the Nile delta, where at that time marshy lowlands lay beside flood meadows. This place was well suited for livestock raising, though of course not nomadic, but settled and pasture-based, with seasonal movement. It is no accident that former nomads settled there: Semitic livestock herders who had moved to Egypt from the oases of Sinai and the dry steppes of Syria.
Jacob's descendants were to live on this land for more than one century, becoming, like their neighbors, settled inhabitants and almost forgetting the steppes and deserts where their ancestors had lived. But before they went there, God addresses Jacob one last time before the migration. He tells Jacob that his migration is not the completion of the path, but only its beginning. "I will bring you back" is said so that Jacob may know: Egypt is not a reward for labors, but a base for rest and preparation for the further path, spiritual and historical.
Jacob himself will not see the Exodus; his earthly path will end earlier, but Joseph will carry his bones out of Egypt, and in this sense, even if symbolically, Jacob will share the fate of his people and travel their path with them. Jacob and Joseph both understand that God is acting in their lives, and people and circumstances enter those lives insofar as God allows them to enter. So it is now: the migration of Jacob and his tribesmen to Egypt is a process that is easy to describe historically as one element of much larger movements, as part of the mass migration of Semitic tribes that affected the entire Near East.
This process began much earlier; Abraham's migration was already part of it. God does not lead those whom He leads after Himself outside the historical processes of their age. On the contrary, He includes them in history; but in including them, He does not let them get lost in it. After all, God Himself wants to enter the world, and therefore history. To enter together with and through those whom He leads after Himself. And with their help to make the history of the fallen world His own: the history of salvation.