Genesis/Bereshith 48 – “Here, I am dying, but God will be with you . . .”

• ArtScroll Comment: “The blessing included a major change in the composition of the Jewish people, in that Jacob elevated Manasseh and Ephraim to the status of his own sons — in effect adopting them as his own — thereby removing the firstborn status from the tribe of Reuben and giving it to Joseph’s offspring. . . [prayer of blessing] Jewish parents will always remember that Joseph’s sons were elevated to the status of full-fledged tribal fathers.”

• S6K Comment:  Wouldn’t that make his brothers even more jealous now, And what about all the other grandchildren listed among the 66, what effect would this have on their thinking if any?

—except that they’re still in grateful-mode 

—plus they have their past evil deeds to make up to Joseph, 

—and they’re now the beggars, who are they to complain?

—-Plus the children yet to be born from Joseph?

They are on foreign soil, whatever possessions they did have would go to buying food during the famine.

And the land they had just left behind —Canaan—was not yet theirs.  While Ur and Haran were ‘home’ 2-3 generations ago, surely there’s no returning to scheming grand-uncle Laban.   If you were in Ephraim and Manasseh’s situation—-

—half-breeds, 

—Egypt-born,

—brought up in relative comfort and prosperity 

—by a honcho Hebrew father and Egyptian mother

—exposed to Egyptian culture and way of life, 

what would you be thinking?  Your father looks more Egyptian than Hebrew in your eyes,  that is why your uncles didn’t even recognize him.  And now, since Goshen is where all your father’s people will live as shepherds,  are you going to live there too?

took with him his two sons. That Jacob might bless them before his death.

[RA] And he took his two sons with him. Joseph, even before he receives any word from his father in this regard, anticipates that Jacob will confer some sort of special eminence on his own two sons in a deathbed blessing, and so he brings them with him.

Israel strengthened himself.  He exerted himself and sat up, with his feet on the ground.

God Almighty. Heb. ‘El Shaddai’.

Luz. i.e. Beth-el, see XXVIII,19.

[RA] Luz.  This is the older name for Beth-El, where Jacob was vouchsafed his dream-vision of divine messengers ascending and descending the ramp to heaven.

an everlasting possession. In spite of temporary loss, the children of Israel have an inalienable right tot he Land of promise.

and now. Jacob adopts the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, born before he came to Egypt, thus making them equal to any of his other sons.  By giving him  a double portion of his inheritance, he transferred to Joseph the rights of the true firstborn.

[EF] they are mine:  As it were, adopted.  Efrayim and Menashe:  Note how Yaakov reverses the order of birth, see. vv14:17-19.

[RA] your two sons . . . shall be mine—Ephraim and Manasseh, like Reuben and Simeon, shall be mine.  These words are equally fraught with thematic and legal implications.  Jacob explicitly equates Joseph’s two sons with his own firstborn and second-born, intimating that the former are to have as good an inheritance, or better, as the latter, and once more invokes the great Genesis theme of the reversal of primogeniture.  (Note that he already places Ephraim, the younger, before Manasseh when he names Joseph’s sons.)  The fact that Reuben has violated Jacob’s concubine and Simeon (with Levi) has initiated the massacre at Shechem may suggest that they are deemed unworthy to be undisputed first and second in line among Jacob’s inheritors.  The language Jacob uses, moreover, is a formula of legal adoption, just as the gesture of placing the boys on the old man’s knees (see verse 12) is a ritual gesture of adoption.  The adoption is dictated by the fact that Ephraim and Manasseh will become tribes, just as if they were sons of Jacob.

called after the name of their brethren.  They will be included in the tribe of Ephraim or in the tribe of Manasseh.

[RA]  And those you begot after them.  It is difficult to square this phrase with the narrative as we have it, which indicates that Joseph has only two sons.  The efforts of some commentators to make the verb a future is not at all warranted by the Hebrew grammar, and, in any case, Joseph has been married more than twenty-five years.

by their brothers’ names they shall be called in their inheritance.  Although the idiom is familiar, the meaning is not entirely transparent.  What Jacob probably is saying is that it is Ephraim and Manasseh who will have tribal status in the future nation, and thus any other sons of Joseph would be “called by their name,” would have claim to land that was part of the tribal inheritance of Ephraim and Manasseh and so designated.

Rachel.  These words, it seems, Jacob spoke to himslef; otherwise he would have said, ‘thy mother.’  It is to honour Rachel, the sorrow of whose loss haunts him all his life, that Jacob adopts her grandchildren as his own sons.  Instead of being the mother of only two tribes, she will now be accounted the ancestress of three, her honour and esteem increasing accordingly (Herxheimer, S.R. Hirsch).

unto me. Or, ‘to my sorrow’ (RV); cf. XXXIII,13.

[EF] Rahel died on me:  The memory is still painful to Yaakov, even after many years.

[RA] As for me, when I was coming from Paddan, Rachel died.  This verse is one of several elements in this chapter that have been seized on by textual critics as evidence of its highly composite nature and of what is claimed to be a concomitant incoherence in its articulations.  But such conclusions seriously underestimate the degree of integrative narrative logic that the writer—or perhaps one must say, the redactor—exhibits.  At first glance Jacob’s comment about the death of his beloved Rachel in the midst of blessing his grandsons seems a non sequitur.  It is, however, a loss to which he has never been reconciled (witness his extravagant favoritism toward Rachel’s firstborn). His vivid sense of anguish, after all these decades, is registered in the single word ‘alai (“to my grief,” but literally, “on me,” the same word he uses in 42:36, when he says in 42:36, when he says that all the burden of bereavement is on him), and this loss is surely uppermost in his mind when he tells Pharaoh that his days have been few and evil.  On this deathbed, then, Jacob reverts obsessively to the loss of Rachel, who perished in childbirth leaving behind only two sons, and his impulse to adopt Rachel’s two grandsons by her firstborn expresses a desire to compensate, symbolically and legally, for the additional sons she did not live to bear.

beheld.  He is on his deathbed with eyes dimmed by the mist that would soon close them forever.  He does not know his grandchildren who accompany their father.  He discerned faintly the figures of the young men but could not distinguish their features; see v. 10.

[RA]  Who are these? Perhaps as several commentators have proposed, he could barely make out their features because he was virtually blind (see verse 10).  “And Israel saw,” then, would mean something like “he dimly perceived,” and it need not be an out-and-out contradiction of the indication of blindness in verse 10.  But the question he asks might also be the opening formula in the ceremony of adoption.

could not see. Clearly; hence his question when seeing Joseph’s sons, ‘Who are these?’

[EF] your face: The final and more powerful occurrence of the term.

from between his knees. To place a child upon the knees was the symbol of adoption.  Joseph’s sons had thus been placed upon or between the knees of Jacob.  This having been done, Joseph removes them.

fell down on his face.  In gratitude to his father.

Jacob was now to bless the lads.  Joseph places Manasseh, the first-born, opposite to Jacob’s right hand. This position was the station of honour.

guiding his hands wittingly.  Jacob against Joseph’s wish, places the younger above the elder.  This is the first instance in Scripture of the laying on of the hands in blessing.

[RA] he crossed his hands. This image, extended in the exchange with Joseph in which the old man says he knows what he is doing, is a kind of summarizing thematic idiogram of the Book of Genesis:  the right hand of the father conferring the blessing reaches across to embrace the head of the younger brother, and the elder, his head covered by the old man’s left hand, receives a lesser blessing.

blessed Joseph. By blessing his children (Rashbam).

[EF] tended: Or “shepherded.”

[RA] the name of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac,’let them teem multitudinous. Jacob after recapitulating the story of his personal providence in the first line of the blessing-poem, invokes the benediction of the patriarchal line, and then, going back still further in the biblical history, the promise or injunction, of fertility from the Creation story.

the angel. This verse is connected with the preceding verse.  The Jonathan Targum paraphrases:  “The God whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac worshipped, the God who hath nourished me all my life long unto this day—may it be Thy will that the angel whom Thou didst appoint to redeem me from all evil, bless the lads.’

let my name be named in them. i.e., ‘may they be worthy of having their names coupled with my own, and those of my ancestors Abraham and Isaac’ (Sforno).

[EF] redeemed me from all ill-fortune: Despite his words in 47:9, perhaps Yaakov achieves a measure of peace in the end.  my name continue to be called through them:  My line continue through them.  teem-like-fish: Others use “become teeming (multitudes).”

it displeased him. Seeing his father place the younger son above the elder.  What is narrated in v. 17-19 happened before the blessing was given (Rashbam).

he held up. He grasped.

I know it. ‘That Manasseh is the firstborn’ (Rashi).

his younger brother shall be greater.  Just as if he had been endowed with his birthright.  The younger brother in Scripture is at times preferred to the elder.  Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Moses and DAvid afford striking instances of this fact.

a multitude. lit. ‘fullness’,

[EF] I know:  Though blind, Yaakov knows exactly what he is doing, unlike his father in Chap. 27.

By thee shall Israel bless. To this day, every pious Jewish father on Sabbath eve places his hands on the head of his son, and blesses him in the words: ‘God make thee as Ephraim and Manasseh’ (Authorised Prayer Book, p. 122).  Ephraim and Manasseh would not barter away their ‘Jewishness’ for the most exalted social position, or the most enviable political career, in the Egyptian state.  They volunterily gave up their place in the higher Egyptian aristocracy, and openly identified themselves with their ‘alien’ kinsmen, the despised shepherd-immigrants.  Every Jewish parent may well pray that his children show the same loyalty to their father and their father’s God as did Ephraim and Manasseh.

[RA] And he blessed them that day. The introduction of a second blessing is hardly evidence of a glitch in textual transmission.  After the exchange with Joseph, which follows the full-scale blessing and also explains its implications, Jacob reaffirms his giving precedence to Ephraim over Manasseh (a real datum of later tribal history) by stating a kind of summary blessing in which the name of the younger precedes the name of the elder.  “By you shall Israel bless” is meant quite literally: when the future people of Israel want to invoke a blessing, they will do it by reciting the words, “May God set you as Ephraim and Manasseh.”

This verse is the blessing addressed to Joseph personally.

portion. Heb. shechem. The reference is to the plot of ground purchased by Jacob from Hamor at Shechem; see XXXIII,19.  It seems from the context that this plot of land had fallen into the hands of the Amorites, and had been retaken from them by force of arms.  Jacob’s military exploit is not elsewhere mentioned.

above thy brethren.  i.e. more than thy brethren.  Some commentators explain the exgtra portion bestowed upon Joseph as referring to the privilege accorded to his two sons in being accounted equals of the other tribes.

[EF] one portion over and above:  Hebrew unclear.  We do not know to what event Yaakov is referring in this entire verse.  took away:  Others use “will take,” “must take.”

[RA] I have given you with single intent over your brothers what I took from the hand of the Emorite. The phrase represented here by “with single intent” is a notorious crux, but previous interpreters may have been misled by assuming it must be the object of the verb “have given.”  The Hebrew shekhem ‘aad means literally “one shoulder.”  Many commentators and translators, with an eye to the immediate context of inheritance, have construed this as “one portion,” but the evidence elsewhere in the Bible that shekhem means “portion” is weak.  Others have proposed, without much more warrant than the shape of the shoulder, that the word here means “mountain slope.”  A substantial number of scholars, medieval and modern, read this as a proper noun, the city of Shechem, encouraged by the fact that the Joseph tribes settled in the vicinity of Shechem. That construction, however, entails two difficulties:  if the city were referred to, a feminine form of the word for “one” (not ‘aad but ‘aat) would be required; and at least according to the preceding narrative, Jacob, far from having conquered Shechem with his own sword, was horrified by the massacre his sons perpetrated there.  But the very phrase used here, shekhem ‘aad, occurs at one other place in the Bible, Zephaniah 3:9, where it is used adverbially in an idiomatic sense made clar by the immediate context:  “for all of them to invoke the name of the LORD,/to serve Him shekhem ead [King James Version, with one consent; Revised English Bible and New Jewish Publication Society Bible, with one accord].”  This is then, an expression that indicates concerted unswerving intention and execution, and as such is perfectly appropriate to the legal pronouncement of legacy by Jacob in which it appears.  Once the phrase is seen as adverbial, the relative clause, “what I took . . .,” falls into place with grammatical preciseness as the object of the verb “have given,” and in this reading, no particular city or region need be specified.