Genesis 47:13-31

Hey, welcome back everyone.
Thanks for joining us on this Wednesday,
Ash Wednesday as we begin the season of Lent.
And as we continue to make our way
through the latter part of the book of Genesis nearing
the end, about halfway through the 47th chapter today,
and really a new setting in terms of the story,
Jacob and all of Joseph’s brothers have now relocated to Egypt.
The Pharaoh has set them up in the land of Goshen with good land.
And now,
as we’ve been focused very tightly on that family and their dealings and situations,
we now pull back a little bit,
and it’s really interesting the way that
near the end of the story,
we do get a couple of looks at the larger picture of Egypt generally.
And today, that’s really the focus of what we see.
So verse 13,
I’ll read through some of this,
I may skip around a little bit because you’ll
get the sense of the story that’s being told quickly,
but jump in at verse 13 here.
“Now there was no food in all the land for the famine was severe.
The land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine.
Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and Canaan in exchange
for the grain that they bought.
And Joseph brought the money into the Pharaoh’s house.
When the money from the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan was spent, all the Egyptians
came to Joseph and said, ‘Give us food.
Why should we die before your eyes,
for our money is gone?’
And Joseph answered, ‘Give me your livestock,
and I’ll give you food in exchange for your livestock,’
which happens.” And then verse 18 here,
“When that year was ended,
they came to him the following year.
And they said, ‘We cannot hide from my Lord that our money is spent,
and the herds and
cattle are my lords.
There’s nothing left in the sight of our Lord but to buy our bodies and lands.
Shall we die before your eyes,
both we and our land?
Buy us and our land in exchange for food.
We with our land will become slaves to Pharaoh.
Just give us seed that we may live and not die,
and that the land may not become desolate.'”
So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh.
All the Egyptians sold their fields because the famine was severe upon them,
and the land became the Pharaohs.
And as for the people,
he made slaves of them.
“From one end of Egypt to the other,
only the land of the priests,
he did not buy for
the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance.
Then Joseph said to the people,
‘Now that I have this day bought you and your land for
Pharaoh, here is seed for your land,
and to harvest you shall give one fifth to the Pharaoh.
Four fish will be yours,
as for the seed and the field and the food and yourselves and your households,
and to the food for your little ones.’
They said,
‘You have saved our lives.
May it please my Lord,
we will be slaves to Pharaoh.'”
So Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt,
and it stands to this day that
Pharaoh should have the fifth.
The land of the priests alone did not become the Pharaoh.
So again, just a very interesting little interlude in the text as we look at
what Joseph continues to do on behalf of the Pharaoh and the ways in which Joseph’s actions contribute to the
power and the wealth and the size and prosperity of Egypt,
though not for all the people.
And this is a maybe uncomfortable text for us as we mentioned slavery,
though it’s a different kind of slavery.
You’ll see here they sold themselves into it.
That’s a more typical pattern in the scripture than the slavery we know where one people
is taken and forced to become slaves.
There’s no less forcing here,
but it’s economically forced.
The people have to agree to enter into this relationship.
I don’t know what the point is,
Michael, here other than to say Joseph continues to serve exceptionally well,
Pharaoh and Egypt continue to be blessed through Joseph’s service.
And I do think we maybe see a forerunner here of the pattern that becomes important in a
couple of chapters when we close this book and we move into Exodus and we see that the
people of Israel then also become slaves.
Yeah, right.
There is most likely some version of foreshadowing,
if not the outcome for the Israelites,
certainly the outcome as it relates to the movement of the way in which Joseph’s rule and this
economic benefit of the Pharaoh having prepared ahead of time has set up this situation that
will in the future potentially grow deeper roots and then come back to unfortunately
affect the people of Israel.
Another note about that slavery, Clint,
it may be more equivalent to our understanding
of the idea of serfdom in the Middle Ages than it does from our American understanding of slavery.
This is Pharaoh ruling over all of Pharaoh’s people for the purpose of economic benefit
as opposed to any kind of hierarchical race relationship of any kind.
This doesn’t matter if you’re from Egypt or if you’re from another nation.
Ultimately,
it’s these folks couldn’t pay and so therefore they enter into a reciprocal
relationship where Pharaoh provides for them the resources they need for agricultural subsistence
and the people essentially agree to a 20% tax.
Yeah, it’s almost more along the lines of a foreclosure.
They’re likely the same race as Pharaoh.
There’s not a difference here in terms of who they are.
You could say,
I think I might even argue that there’s not a sense that the slave holders
treat the slaves as lesser.
I think that’s coming.
That’s coming when we get to Exodus.
In this case though,
the difference is financial and maybe you could argue that the poor are
always valued to some extent less than others.
But really here,
this is a kind of,
I bought your contract,
you work for me and you get
to benefit from it as do I.
It certainly is one-sided.
It’s certainly more benefit to Pharaoh,
economically speaking,
though it prolongs the life and
does save the lives of those who come into it.
But it’s maybe not entirely comfortable,
but I think you’re exactly right,
Michael.
This is not the slavery that we know in our own history.
It is something different than that.
And this continues to,
I think, show us the wisdom of Joseph’s leadership,
of Joseph’s plan to set aside the grain.
It highlights way back when,
when we saw Joseph interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh,
this only reinforces that he was correct and that he in his wisdom and God’s guidance has made
a good plan given what the circumstances were going to be.
You know, Clint,
we recognize here that in the same way or similar way, at least, where
Jacob’s blessing brought material benefit to Laban,
here Joseph’s blessing is clearly
bringing material benefit to Pharaoh.
And we discover that those who are key characters along the way or those who come into a relationship
or intersect with the one who carries the blessing,
they themselves receive a version
of that blessing by indirect contact to it.
God is so great
that when you put God and that blessing in connection,
even with the greatest nation on earth,
Egypt,
they benefit substantially from it.
And don’t miss the fact,
a 20%
return on this investment that Pharaoh has made in trusting Joseph is substantial.
I mean, that’s that’s an incredible amount of wealth and prestige and capability generated.
And of course,
we who just maybe even have a cursory understanding of Egyptian history
know how mighty of a nation Egypt was for hundreds and thousands of years.
The reality is that here we see that the God of Israel is so great that in his blessing
of Joseph and Joseph’s wise and discerning leadership,
we then can see that it is God
who’s at work, even in the midst of this mighty nation,
that God is greater than who we might
think of as the greatest.
And that is, you know, that’s distinctly Genesis.
That’s always been the theme.
But now,
instead of where Laban was the father-in-law and there was a little bit of,
you know, those herds increasing,
now we have this at a national political level,
the largest country we see
the blessing having an impact.
And I don’t know if that’s the entire point of this section,
but it’s certainly a theme
we’ve seen before, Clint.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
I think it’s an interesting inclusion in the text,
and it stands there as kind of almost
a bridge in an interesting way,
a nod to Joseph’s effectiveness and to Egypt’s power,
which as we finish the end of Genesis,
more and more, this book begins to reach into Exodus
and build some bridges there.
And I think perhaps,
Michael, as you said,
this may be one of them.
Let’s go ahead and finish the rest of the chapter here,
a very, very different change
of pace here, a very different story.
Verse 27,
“Israel settled in the land of Egypt in the region of Goshen,
and they gained possessions
in it.
They were fruitful.
They multiplied exceedingly.
Jacob lived in the land of Egypt 17 years.
So, the days of Jacob,
the years of his life, were 147 years.
When the time of Israel’s death drew near,
he called his son Joseph,
and he said to him,
‘If I found favor with you,
put your hand under my thigh and promise to deal loyally
and truly with me.
Do not bury me in Egypt.
When I die,
when I lie down with my ancestors,
carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial place.’
He answered, ‘I will do as you have said.’
And he said, ‘Swear it to me.’
And Joseph swore to him.
Then Israel bound himself on the head of his bed.” So,
a significant time passes.
We’re now on the backside of the famine.
All of that is behind us.
We cover a big step of time here in one verse.
And Jacob, knowing that he will not be on the earth much longer,
calls Joseph, which is interesting because you would think that would fall—you know,
Joseph is eleventh in line,
so you would expect that to fall to one of the older brothers.
But Joseph is the favored son.
He’s also the most powerful son.
He’s certainly shown himself capable,
and he has resources.
And so Jacob says to him,
“I want you to make me a promise.
I want you to promise me that you won’t bury me here.
This is not home.
We live here.
We’re making a home here.
We’re multiplying.
We’re succeeding.
But these are not my roots.
This is not—maybe you have a close relationship with the place you were born,
the place you grew up.
Interestingly enough, in the pastoral life,
given that it’s a life that moves around,
when I sometimes think of the question of where—if I died in the near future,
where would I be buried?
My hometown is not necessarily what I’d choose,
but it’s in the mix.
The thought of that being my place,
and that’s Jacob here.
He makes Joseph promise him that you won’t bury me here in Egypt.
I don’t belong here.
Ultimately, I want to be with my ancestors in their burial place,
and that is of such
significant importance to him that he doesn’t ask Joseph just to agree to it.
He essentially makes him swear an oath to it.
Yeah, so Clint,
the ramifications of this amount to even more than just a sense of where
we feel connected, because in the case of Israel or Jacob here,
remember that his ancestors
are buried in the place of the promise.
They’re buried in the place that God told them that he would give them.
And so when he says to Joseph,
“I want to be buried in the place of promise,” what
he’s saying is that Egypt is just a rest stop along the way.
This isn’t the place that God has given us.
I want to be reunited in the very place where God has said
we will have a place.
And that is unbelievably important,
because it reminds us of Abraham’s story very much
as Abraham was dying.
He begged his son Isaac.
“Don’t marry any of the women of this place,” if you remember that story he was saying, you know,
“I want you to go back to our family.
I want you to be connected to the people of promise.”
I mean, this theme will get taken up later in the prophets,
that God has made a promise.
God will be faithful to return to the people,
even if right now they find themselves literally in Egypt.
We later discover in Scripture that Egypt becomes not only a place where the Israelites find slavery
and they find this long period of trouble,
which will be ahead for them,
but in Scripture it begins to be taken up as a metaphor for the difficult slavery and
captivities of the people of Israel,
though it may take the name of other nations in the future.
And so here
we discover that in the very Genesis story of how God brings God’s people and the
families of those people into the world,
that there’s a resolute commitment.
We are not going to allow the rest stop place
to be a substitute for what is
God’s promised end place.
And that is not only his personal promise,
but it really in many ways represents the
hope of the people of Israel,
the nation of Israel,
that God has made this covenantal
promise to all of these errors.
And when Joseph swears this oath,
he commits to say,
“Though I may be in a place of power,
though Egypt may be for us now a place of prosperity,
wealth, and growth,
it will not be forever.” And that is, it’s important not only to these characters, Clint,
it’s really important to
the rest of the Old Testament that will follow it.
Yeah, that this is ultimately not the place that we will be established,
that God has given us a land,
and it isn’t this land, and we will,
at least Jacob plans,
that Israel, the people, will return to it.
And that such is the seriousness here that,
you know, this is an extremely binding kind
of oath, this business about hand under the thigh.
That essentially has to do with the power of men to procreate the idea of seed,
swear on your lineage, swear on your power,
swear on your lifeblood.
The word there, translated thigh,
can also be translated even something like genitals.
And so it’s the idea of you’re making a promise on your lifeblood,
on your lifeline, on your lineage, and it is considered a binding oath.
One wouldn’t break that.
I mean, that’s more than just do this for me.
That is,
I have to have your undying word on your lifeblood that you will do this for me.
And Joseph says yes.
You know, Clint,
we,
I think sometimes in 21st century Western culture,
miss the importance of the air,
miss the importance of the lineage,
and so a section of scripture like that may
seem really, really strange to us.
But the
commitment being made here is Joseph is making an undying,
unbreakable promise that I will do this thing.
And this is the larger culture.
It’s the larger sort of umbrella that lives over this entire story.
It may strike us as strange to see something like that.
But the idea of the heirs who carry on more than just the idea of a family name,
but that literally carry on the promise that this scandalous idea that God’s promise could be
bound to people with names,
to families that go on.
And yet that’s exactly what the text is suggesting,
is that ultimately, this is all rooted in
one father,
one son,
one daughter.
It passes down through in this way.
That’s not what this text is about.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m taking some interpretive license there.
But my point is,
if that seems strange to you,
it only seems strange to us,
I think, to illustrate how important that is as an overall theme.
It’s not strange to Genesis,
because that’s what’s at stake here.
But for us, we might hear that and think,
“Huh, well, that’s not kind of how I would
make an unbreakable promise.”
But that is assumed by the culture and times that the text were joining here.
Yeah.
I don’t know what the modern equivalent of that is,
I give you my word,
or I sign a contract.
It’s very…
My seven-year-old would say a pinky swear.
Pinky swear.
Yeah, I mean, it is a sacred,
literally, and I use that word intentionally.
It is in the context of the story,
a sacred vow,
and should, I really think, be seen that way.
And so, that’s where we are.
Tomorrow, we will probably try to get through most of chapter 48 of…
In fact, really, all of chapter 48 is one story.
So we’ll probably try to get through there if we can.
That would, I think, bring us to a good place to break for the weekend.
If you’re out and about tonight,
6 o’clock, we will be having an Ash Wednesday service.
If you’d like to come out before that,
we’ll have a dinner at 5.
I think it’s pork loin and roast potatoes.
Move?
Yeah, I think it should be pretty good.
You’d be welcome to join us.
Dinner is $3,
does that sound right?
Yep, it is.
And then the service following.
So if not, we’ll see you tomorrow, hopefully,
and thanks for being with us.
Blessings, everybody.