Chapter Forty-Six

Jacob with all his encampment rises from his place of sojourn in Canaan and goes toward Egypt; at Beersheba he receives a vision, which finally confirms him in his intention to go to Egypt

Genesis 46:1–4. And Israel set out with all that he had, and came to Beersheba, and offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. And God said to Israel in a night vision: Jacob! Jacob! And he said: Here I am. God said: I am God, the God of your father; do not fear to go down to Egypt, for I will make you a great nation there; I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again. And Joseph will close your eyes with his own hand. Jacob, impelled by natural love for Joseph, without hesitation accepts the decision to follow his proposal to settle in Egypt. But, as a patriarch of the divinely chosen tribe, he necessarily had to see in this settlement a very decisive step, extraordinarily important for the subsequent fate and history of his descendants: Abraham had been given a revelation that his descendants would be strangers in a foreign land, would be enslaved and oppressed, but then would return to Canaan (Gen 15:13-16). The events recounted in chapters 37–45 served as preparation for the settlement of Jacob’s house in Egypt. This settlement had the following purposes: first, the separation of the chosen family from the Canaanites, with whom intermarriage, which had already begun (Gen 38:2), could be extremely harmful to the religious mission of Abraham’s descendants; on the other hand, in Egypt with its disdain for Asians, this isolation of the chosen people was achieved, and the high state of Egyptian culture could have a fruitful influence on this bearer of true worship of God. Jacob stops exactly at Beersheba because this place was consecrated by Abraham – by the building of an altar and worship there (Gen 21:33) and by a theophany to Isaac (Gen 26:23-24). Instinctively aware of the importance of the moment (of settlement), Jacob offers a solemn sacrifice at a place sanctified by historical memories, and entreats the blessing of the Lord on his way. Encouraging Jacob, the Lord calls himself “God of gods” (El-Elohei), the God of the covenant, by whose will the settlement of Jacob in Egypt is now taking place, and who will not abandon his descendants there and will transform them into a great nation. The bringing out of Egypt is promised, of course, not to Jacob personally, but to his descendants. To Jacob himself is promised, at least, a peaceful death and the consolation that his beloved son Joseph will close his eyes (Gen 50:1). This ancient custom is spoken of, for example, by Homer (Iliad 11, 453; Odyssey 24, 294).

Genesis 46:5. Jacob set out from Beersheba; and the sons of Israel carried Jacob their father, and their children, and their wives in the carts which Pharaoh had sent to carry him. Strengthened by the divine promise of gracious protection from above and consoled by the promise of peaceful death in the hands of his beloved son, Jacob immediately with all his tribe sets out from Beersheba to Egypt. A picture of the settlement of some Semitic family in Egypt is presented in a relief in the tomb of the Pharaoh Amenhotep (12th dynasty) and depicts an event, in character and period, very close to the settlement of Jacob’s family in Egypt.

Genesis 46:6. And they took their livestock and their property which they had acquired in the land of Canaan, and came to Egypt – Jacob and all his offspring with him. From the fact that it is said that Jacob and his sons took their livestock and possessions acquired in Canaan, the rabbis concluded that all that Jacob had brought from Mesopotamia was ceded to Esau.

Genesis 46:7. He brought with him his sons and his grandsons, his daughters and his granddaughters, and all his offspring, into Egypt. “Daughters” of Jacob, of whom only one is known – Dinah (Gen 34:1) – here are perhaps Jacob’s daughters-in-law.

Genealogy of the immediate descendants of Jacob who went out with him to Egypt

Genesis 46:8–25. These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt: Jacob and his sons. The firstborn of Jacob was Reuben. The sons of Reuben: Hanoch, and Pallu, and Hezron, and Carmi. The sons of Simeon: Jemuel, and Jamin, and Ohad, and Jachin, and Zohar, and Shaul, son of a Canaanite woman. The sons of Levi: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. The sons of Judah: Er and Onan, and Shelah, and Perez, and Zerah; but Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan. The sons of Perez were: Hezron and Hamul. The sons of Issachar: Tola, and Puvah, and Iob, and Shimron. The sons of Zebulun: Sered, and Elon, and Jahleel. These are the sons of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob in Mesopotamia, and Dinah his daughter. All the souls of his sons and daughters were thirty-three. The sons of Gad: Ziphion, and Haggi, Shuni, and Ezbon, Eri, and Arodi, and Areli. The sons of Asher: Imnah, and Ishvah, and Ishvi, and Beriah, and Serah their sister. The sons of Beriah: Heber and Malchiel. These are the sons of Zilpah, whom Laban gave to Leah his daughter; she bore them to Jacob – sixteen souls. The sons of Rachel, Jacob’s wife: Joseph and Benjamin. And to Joseph in the land of Egypt were born Manasseh and Ephraim, whom Asenath daughter of Potiphera priest of On bore to him. The sons of Benjamin: Bela, and Becher, and Ashbel; the sons of Bela were Gera, and Naaman, Ehi, and Rosh, Muppim, and Huppim, and Ard. These are the sons of Rachel who were born to Jacob – fourteen souls in all. The son of Dan: Hushim. The sons of Naphtali: Jahzeel, and Guni, and Jezer, and Shillem. These are the sons of Bilhah, whom Laban gave to Rachel his daughter; she bore them to Jacob – seven souls in all. A register of Jacob’s immediate descendants who settled with him in Egypt, or who were in part already born in Egypt, is given here. This genealogy, according to the concepts and customs of the ancient East in general and of the ancient Hebrews in particular, held extremely important significance as a document; on the one hand it shows that the later division of the nation into tribes, generations, families, and so on, had its roots in the corresponding division of the patriarchal family – it shows, consequently, that the subsequent increase of Jacob’s descendants into a whole nation in Egypt occurred through natural population growth and natural development in the political and ethnographic sense, without violent influence from the Egyptians and their political system; on the other hand, this genealogy could have legal significance, insofar as it proved the right of each line of Jacob’s descendants to occupy territory in the promised land, by virtue of the universally known descent from that or another son or grandson of Jacob. The number of members in this genealogy – seventy – is not without significance, in view of the symbolic meaning of the numbers 7, 10, 70 in biblical language (as in ancient language in general). “The number 70 appears throughout sacred history as especially significant: it appears in the table of nations (Gen 10), in the seventy elders of Moses, in the Jewish Sanhedrin, in the seventy disciples of the Lord, in the translation of the Seventy, in the Jewish reckoning of the peoples of the world and their number as 70. 10 is the number of completed human development; 7 is the number of God’s perfect work; 70, consequently, means the perfect, completed development of God’s people. But complete development presupposes seed, grain: this is the house of the patriarch of 70 souls. The number 70, thus, in the migrating family prefigures the sacred seed of God’s people” (Negelsbachs, Delitzsch). The number 70 in this genealogy is obtained as follows: 1st group – from Leah (verses 8–15) 33 members (actually, including Dinah, 32, but probably Jacob is also counted), verse 15; 2nd group – from Zilpah (verses 16–18) 16 people; 3rd – from Rachel (verses 19–22) 14; 4th – from Bilhah 7. That this accounting is correct, and 70 is not a round number, is evident from the repetition of this figure in Exod 1:5; Deut 10:22 (Russian and Slavonic translations) have a different figure: 75, which number is probably obtained from the addition (in verse 20) of five descendants of Manasseh and Ephraim (75 is indicated, according to the Septuagint, also in the speech of the archdeacon Stephen, Acts 7:14). In comparison with Num 26:5-51 and 1 Chr 4:1-37, where the genealogy of Jacob’s sons and further his descendants is also given, there are many peculiarities in Gen 46:8-27, such as: different spelling of names (Gen 46:10 – Jemuel, in Num 26:12 and 1 Chr 4:24 – Nemuel; Zohar, Gen 46:10 – in Num 26:13 – Zerah, and so on); mention (in later biblical catalogues of names) of completely new names, and conversely, the omission of entire individual families. In this case, the redaction of the 1st book of Chronicles often disagrees with both the earliest, but mostly agrees now with one (Genesis), now with another (Numbers). The difficulty in explaining these variants is not insuperable, although sometimes quite significant – for instance, the fact that persons (Ard, Naaman), named in the Book of Genesis (verse 21) as sons of Benjamin, in the Book of Numbers appear as his grandsons. One may acknowledge the catalogue Num 26 as more precise in comparison with Gen 46; but on the whole both genealogies confirm and supplement each other. Even the genealogy of the 1st book of Chronicles, despite all the difficulty of reconciling its statements with the Book of Genesis and the Book of Numbers, in its turn confirms the uninterrupted and uncorrupted existence among Israel of genealogies from ancient times, and speaks strongly against the new biblical-critical school, which dates the redaction of the Pentateuch to the time after the Babylonian captivity, contemporaneous with the writing of the book of Chronicles: differences in the genealogies of these three redactions in such a case remain without any explanation. In the entire genealogical table, only two women’s names are mentioned (besides the 4 wives of Jacob, by whom the entire genealogy is grouped): the daughter of Jacob – Dinah (verse 15), and a granddaughter (through Asher) – Serah (verse 17), which, of course, corresponds to the fact that genealogies among the ancient Hebrews had an official-legal significance, in which only the enumeration of male descendants, fully capable in the political and economic sense, held importance. The remark in verse 10, that Shaul, one of the sons of Simeon, was the son of a Canaanite woman, gave occasion to the Jewish tradition to the already mentioned identification of Dinah with this Canaanite woman. Perhaps more simply explained is this remark from the unusualness of the marriages of Jacob’s sons with Canaanite women.

Genesis 46:27. The sons of Joseph who were born to him in Egypt were two souls. All the souls of the house of Jacob who came to Egypt were seventy-five. Because of the closeness of names which is observed in the genealogy of the times of Jacob–Joseph (Gen 46:8-25) and Moses (Num 26:5-51) and the inclusion in the Genesis list of persons already born in Egypt, Metropolitan Philaret makes the well-founded observation: “To the passage of the sons of Israel into Egypt is opposed on the one hand the constant residence of Israel in the land of Canaan, and on the other – the constant residence of Israel in Egypt. Therefore the first boundary of the passage is the coming of Joseph, the last – the death of Jacob, for when Moses remarks that after Jacob’s death Joseph remained in Egypt, he and the whole house of his father (Gen 50:22), by this it is shown that the Hebrews until then considered themselves only temporary sojourners in Egypt, and thought of a speedy return migration. Hence the passage into Egypt is understood, and the list of those who crossed into it represents the state of the tribe of Jacob after his death, from this it also becomes clear how those born in Egypt entered into it” (Notes, part II, 246).

Joseph meets his father and brothers and instructs the latter regarding the impending audience with Pharaoh

Genesis 46:28–30. He sent Judah ahead of him to Joseph, to direct him to Goshen. And they came to the land of Goshen. Joseph hitched his chariot and went up to meet Israel his father in Goshen, and when he saw him, he fell on his neck, and wept long on his neck. And Israel said to Joseph: I may die now, having seen your face, since you are still alive. The purpose of the mission of Judah to Joseph on behalf of Jacob was the desire to urge Joseph to come out quickly to meet his father, which Joseph did not delay in doing. The Hebrew text (lehorot in the sense of leheraot) and the Russian translation: “to direct him to Goshen” – (in the sense of approximation to the Slavonic translation) is corrected according to the Samaritan and Greek texts by Professor F. G. Eleonsky, “History of the Israeli people in Egypt,” appendix I, pp. 33–43. Here is seen the preference of the reading of the Septuagint in verses 28–29 and, in particular, it proves the actual existence and determines the location of Heroopolis” (Septuagint: Ηρώων πόλις; Slavonic: “Iroysk grad,” verse 28; “Iroon grad,” verse 29). The scene of affection in the meeting of Jacob and Joseph is indescribable. From the fact that only Joseph is said to have wept, the Midrash concludes that Jacob did not weep, but was seized by prayerful rapture. In any case, entering this final period of his life, Jacob was filled with deep reflections about the ways of providence in his changing fate (compare Gen 48:15-16). Now his spirit increasingly withdraws from the world of earthly life and ascends to that state of spiritual contemplation, from the height of which he pronounced his inspired prophecy about the fate of his descendants (Gen 49:1-28).

Genesis 46:31–34. And Joseph said to his brothers and to his father’s house: I will go up and inform Pharaoh, and say to him: my brothers and my father’s house, who were in the land of Canaan, have come to me; these people are shepherds, for they are herders; and they have brought their flocks and their herds and all that they have. And when Pharaoh calls you and says: what is your occupation? you shall say: your servants have been herders from our youth until now, both we and our fathers, so that you may settle us in the land of Goshen. For every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians. In preparing his brothers for the impending audience with Pharaoh, Joseph earnestly advises them to tell Pharaoh that they are natural nomads – as if warning them against the temptation of being drawn into the pleasures of Egyptian cultural life and abandoning the pastoral occupations of their fathers; the mention of the occupation of their fathers before the Egyptian Pharaoh held particular force, since in the face of the caste nature of ancient Egyptian life, every occupation here was hereditary, passing from father to son. There was indeed a class of shepherds, as is known from Herodotus, Strabo, and Diodorus (Pharaoh had herds), yet the Egyptians regarded pastoral tribes with contempt and hatred (shepherds formed the lowest of 7 castes of the population, with swineherds especially despised, Herodotus 2, 47, 164), because: • they themselves considered agriculture their main occupation, which constituted the highest stage of culture in comparison with herding; • the hated Egyptian domination by the Hyksos, a pastoral people, prompted hatred toward pastoral tribes of Asia in general, and • the nomads of Asia offered in sacrifice those animals which the Egyptians worshiped as gods. Joseph urges his brothers in every way not to hide their occupation, so that for them there might be assigned exactly the land suitable for pastures – the land of Goshen (Wadi Tumilat) – and they not be scattered throughout the cities.