Genesis 48

Friends, welcome back as we continue through Genesis and the week here in Genesis 48.
We will try to get through this,
which means we won’t be reading all of it.
The first part of this chapter,
Jacob is ill and Joseph goes with him taking his two sons.
And they tell Joseph he’s there.
This is sort of a goodbye scene in some ways, I guess.
And where this goes is that,
well, here, let me just read verse 5 and 6.
“Therefore your two sons,
who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came in Egypt,
are now mine.
Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine,
just as Reuben and Simeon are.
As for the offspring born to you after them,
they shall be yours.
They shall be recorded under the names of
their brothers with regard to their inheritance.
For when I came some distance, buried them.
When Israel saw Joseph’s sons,
he said, ‘Who are these?’
Joseph said to his father,
‘They are my sons whom God has given me.’ And he said,
‘Bring them down to me, please,
that I may bless them.’
Now the eyes of Israel were dim with age.
He could not see well,
so Joseph brought them near.
Israel said to Joseph,
‘I did not expect to see your face,
and here God has let me see your children also.’
Then Joseph removed them from his father’s knees as he bowed himself with his face to the earth.
Joseph took both of them,
Ephraim in the right hand,
toward Israel’s left,
and Manasseh in the left hand, toward Israel’s right,
and brought them near.
But Israel stretched out
his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim the younger,
and his left hand on the head of Manasseh,
crossing his hands, for Manasseh was the firstborn.” Let’s stop there for a minute
before we get into the blessing.
So essentially,
this is, we’ve told you from the beginning that
Genesis is interesting in that it maintains a balance between family story and national or nation story.
And here,
we have a really clear instance where those two stories,
those two streams come together, and they overlap.
So what happens here is that Jacob
brings Joseph to him,
has Joseph come to him,
brings Joseph’s sons to him,
and he claims them
in his inheritance that they will be treated as if they were his own children,
that he is going
to bless them and make them equal with his sons, not as grandsons,
but as sons.
And this whole
thing about they will be mine,
and if you have other children,
they will be yours.
But these are mine, and this has to do with blessing.
And what this presupposes is what we’ll see in a
sense is that these sons,
Ephraim and Manasseh,
are going to end up being counted among the tribes of Israel.
There are the brothers.
There’s not a tribe of Josephites.
There’s Danites and Gaddites.
There’s Judites.
There’s all those Benjaminites.
But there’s no Josephites.
And Joseph’s
tribe is essentially divided.
Joseph’s people are essentially divided into two tribes,
Ephraim and Manasseh.
And they take their role in the national story.
And here we see that rooted
in this family moment,
this moment when Jacob,
I don’t know that I want to say adopts them,
Michael, but certainly he claims them.
Yeah. So realistically, we recognize in a story like this that there’s a
lot of things happening behind the scenes.
If you read the scriptures devotionally,
you might eventually find yourself in a circumstance like this.
If you turn to this looking for spiritual wisdom for today,
there’s not going to be a lot of that in this text.
This isn’t here to teach us
about how we should give inheritances to our own children.
Maybe we could talk about it spiritually
in the ways in which we bless other people and that they might carry the faith down.
But realistically,
Clint, to your point,
what’s happening here is we are learning the ways in which the tribes of
Israel have become historically possible based upon the family story.
Remember, this book is Genesis.
It’s the starting story of the Bible.
And so what this is doing for us is it’s fleshing
out for us what will later be the case as we see these 12 tribes named.
And then further down the
road, even it’s going to be later relevant because of how these tribes break up in the northern
southern kingdoms later in the Israel of history.
This becomes even more relevant again.
So what you have happening here is this important setup.
Now we’re about to turn to this next section,
which I think also has some relevance for connections to previous Genesis themes.
So I’m not going to jump into that.
But just to say,
as we see the blessing once again being brought
to the forefront of the text,
we saw that, of course, with Jacob and Esau,
where it was inverted.
In this case, it was encouraged by Jacob’s mother.
Here we have another situation where the blessing
is going to be made.
And it’s interesting because in this case,
it is a grandchild and also notably
a grandchild born in Egypt,
right? Someone who was even outside of the promised land or outside the
families and culture initially of Jacob’s family.
So Clayton, I think this is interesting.
We see in it very much a sort of root to the story of Israel that’s going to come later.
But we also see
the beginning of that return to who gets the blessing and some of those things that we’ve seen before.
Yeah, it does circle around.
So the next part of the story,
Joseph is before Jacob.
Jacob blesses him.
He says,
“Essentially let my name be perpetuated and the name of my ancestors,
Abraham and Isaac,
let them grow into a multitude on the earth.” We’ve seen this before.
The promise
that God will be good to the people of Abraham always has to do with them increasing in number.
That has always been,
that has been from the very beginning,
something wedded to the promise.
It is fruitfulness.
It is multiplication.
It is growth.
Now, we return to something we’ve seen before.
In fact, we saw it specifically with Jacob.
Jacob puts his hands on these boys’ head.
And let me pick up the story in verse 17.
“When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand
on the head of Ephraim, it displeased him.
So he took his father’s hand to remove it from Ephraim’s
head and move it to Manasseh’s head.
Joseph said to his father,
‘Not so, my father,
since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head.’ But his father refused and said,
‘I know my son.
I know.
He also shall become a people,
and he shall be also great.
Nevertheless,
his younger brother shall be greater than he,
and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations.
So he blessed them that day and said,
‘By you Israel will invoke blessing, saying,
‘God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’ So he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh.
Then Israel said to
Joseph, ‘I am about to die,
but God will be with you and bring you again to the land of your ancestors.
I now give to you one portion more than your brothers,
the portion that I took from the
hand of the Amorites with my sword and bow.'” So this is a wonderful kind of moment where Jacob,
remember the lesser brother who swindled the blessing,
took the blessing from Esau,
stood in Esau’s place,
now blesses his two grandsons as if they’re sons.
And he, with his right hand,
which is this symbol of greater blessing,
blesses the younger over the older.
Now, that returns to lots of themes we’ve already said in this story.
And he says the younger will
serve.
And Joseph tries to correct him,
but he says, “No, this is what I’m going to do.”
And then he blesses Joseph,
who functions in the story much like a younger.
He’s not the youngest,
Benjamin is, but really in the context of the way his story is told,
he functions as a youngest.
And he is blessed with an extra portion over his brothers.
And, you know,
Michael, there’s some things we can explain about this in terms of the national story as well.
But it’s an interesting
moment for how much it repeats of the narrative we’ve already seen.
Yeah, right.
Isn’t it interesting how this has been worked in,
in a new way?
We were interested to see how the younger was reaching and striving in the story with Jacob and Esau,
how there was this trickery,
even this kind of political grasping happening in that story.
Now,
it’s as if Jacob is saying,
“No, this is the way.
This is the way that God has chosen is to invert the orders that we
think should be right.” It’s fascinating that in some way the family order has mattered a lot in Genesis.
And then in other ways,
the family order is subverted in so many different ways
from what we would expect it should be,
that it’s almost come to a point now where the order itself
does not matter in comparison to the will and the choice of God.
I think, Clint,
it is so easy
for us to read a text like this and to miss the significance that ultimately God is the one who
is providing a path for the blessing to happen.
And Jacob here in,
really, the text says he makes
Joseph frustrated.
He makes him, it displeases Joseph that he’s doing this thing.
I wonder if there’s not maybe a lesson for us in that.
Something about that often our path does
displease us.
The road that we think should go one way goes another,
that our expectation is unmet.
But that’s because we had an expectation that God had never planned to meet.
I think there’s a way
in which we can read a text like this and see that God’s plan is bigger than our plan.
Here, why Jacob does this,
the text doesn’t, it doesn’t say.
It doesn’t say what his intention is.
Somehow
he knows or at least believes that the younger will be a greater nation.
And so he says that.
And there’s an interesting moment there maybe that we can reflect upon the conditionalness
of all of our perspectives.
And sometimes it’s good to just recognize that our roads will have
turns we don’t expect.
And I think what is interesting is that we read this text going
forward.
In other words,
we read this story as if it is continuing to unfold.
The people who first
read it and told it read it looking backwards.
These were stories that explained some things.
And one of the things it explained is that in the northern kingdom of Israel,
you eventually have
the 12 tribes split.
And there are two in the south in what we call Judah and 10 tribes in
the north that we call Israel.
And of those tribes,
Manasseh becomes the dominant people group.
In fact,
briefly,
that area is called Manasseh.
Sometimes the northern kingdom,
Manasseh, or I’m sorry,
Ephraim, I’m backwards.
I’m doing the wrong thing.
The Ephraimites become the strongest tribe.
And in fact,
sometimes Israel is called Ephraim in the scripture.
There are some Psalms in which God says something about Ephraim.
And the Ephraimites become the
dominant people group of that northern kingdom called Israel,
which gets confusing because we
also call Israel and Judah Israel in the early part of the story.
But when Israel becomes its own thing,
the Ephraimites are the major portion of that and the primary power.
And this text knows where that’s headed.
This text already looks backwards from that perspective of knowing that
and gives this explanation.
Well, you know why that’s true because Jacob blessed Ephraim and
said he would be the greater of the tribes.
He would be the greater of the brothers.
And so,
it’s tough for us when we’re linear,
that the scripture really is told with this wonderful
timeline in which it’s seeing several things at once in which it uses those to explain various
things.
And if we know that,
I do think it helps us wrap our heads around some of the moments a little better.
Clint, a thing I want to point out here is detail that maybe cuts against some of
the character that we have known,
Jacob to be remember.
Maybe even as a good example of this
is when he came back to meet his brother Esau.
You remember the deference that he showed the
clear and some points explicit naming of the fact that he couldn’t fight,
that he couldn’t defend,
that his idea were going to be wiped out.
Well,
there’s this interesting detail at the end of
48 here, verse 22,
where he reveals that he’s taken,
as the text says,
with sword and bow,
a portion from the Amorites,
that the idea that he has gained wealth militarily or with strength,
which is a part of his character that we’ve quite frankly not really been shown.
So, it’s almost like sneaking in at the end,
you know, all of the things that we know about Jacob,
he’s tended to be
more political in solving his issues.
He’s tend to not meet them with force,
but it’s clear in
this gift that he’s giving,
a double portion to Joseph as it is,
that he received this by his own
use of force.
So clearly,
the text is fleshing that out a little bit,
giving us a little bit more context.
And then maybe the other thing to note is,
this story might seem strange on Monday when we
back into the study.
The text really leaves Joseph and his two sons not completely behind,
but I mean, we very much turn into a new section.
And the text focuses on Judah instead of Manasseh
and Ephraim.
And, you know, there’s a sense in which it’s trying to give us the history of all
of it.
All of it is getting jammed in here,
both the history that,
like you say, Clint,
is going to be relevant far later in the Old Testament.
But also,
as we’re about to see,
the shift into the lineage of David and who’s going to be a very notable king later in the story of Israel.
And that goes through Judah’s line.
So there’s actually a lot of family strands all being kept
here.
And we might not know that if we were just reading this sort of like literature,
but there’s a lot happening here that sets up some of the future stories that we have.
Yeah, I hope you can hang in there with us.
As we get close to the end here,
there are some interesting shifts.
Chapter 49 is going to seem strange to us,
but it becomes very important as
we move toward Exodus and as we move toward the formation of a people group,
the nation called Israel who will fall under slavery and then look for a land to be set free in.
This chapter is going to, I think, connect with that in a lot of powerful ways.
So I hope you can join us Monday
as we work our way towards the end of Genesis.
Don’t know that we’ll get there next week,
but we will certainly cover some good ground.
Thanks for being with us, everybody.