Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
I will go down with you, and I will surely bring you up
Genesis 46:1-27
1 Israel traveled with all that he had, and came to Beersheba, and offered sacrifices to the God of his father, Isaac. · WEB
Leaving the promised land is dangerous enough to need God's permission, and it is given with a promise of return attached.
Jacob stops at Beersheba and offers sacrifices, and the halt is the most religiously alert thing he does in the book.
Beersheba is the southern edge of the land — the last place in Canaan before the road to Egypt. It is where Abraham planted a tamarisk and called on the Everlasting God, and where Isaac built an altar the night God told him not to be afraid. Jacob is about to leave the country of the promise, and he stops at the border to ask.
The question he is really asking is a serious one. His father had been explicitly forbidden to go down to Egypt in a famine Genesis 26:2. His grandfather went and came back in disgrace. And a covenant that consists almost entirely of a land looks like something a man should not walk out of.
The answer comes in the visions of the night, with the doubled name that marks urgency: Jacob, Jacob!
And it contains four things. Don't be afraid to go down into Egypt — permission, addressed to the fear he has not spoken. For there I will make of you a great nation — the promise will be kept outside the land, which is not what anyone would have assumed. I will go down with you into Egypt — God is not staying behind at the border. I will also surely bring you up again — the exodus, announced to one old man in a tent four hundred years before it happens.
And then a fifth thing that has nothing to do with nations or land, and is the tenderest sentence God speaks in Genesis: Joseph's hand will close your eyes.
He will not die alone, and the son he mourned for twenty-two years will be the one to perform the last office for his body. God answers the covenant question and then, unasked, answers the question of an old man's heart.
The departure is described with the wagons in it — the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him — and the detail matters because it was the sight of those carts that revived him Genesis 45:27. He rides down into Egypt on the evidence.
Then the list, seventy souls in all, and it is worth pausing on what a list of seventy names is doing here. This is the whole covenant family. Four generations from Abraham, and the people through whom all the families of the earth are to be blessed can be counted on a page and fit in a caravan.
And the very next thing the book says about them is that in Egypt they were fruitful, and multiplied exceedingly Genesis 47:27. The nation is made where nobody would have looked for it — outside the land, in a foreign empire, under the protection of a king who does not know their God. God said he would make them a great nation there, and he does, and the making of it takes four centuries and ends in slavery, which is exactly what he had told Abraham it would Genesis 15:13.
Seventy people go down. The book that follows opens by listing the same names and reporting that the land was filled with them.
settled What this mark means