Biblion Bible Commentary
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Goshen, and a shepherd before Pharaoh
Genesis 46:28-47:12
28 Jacob sent Judah before him to Joseph, to show the way before him to Goshen, and they came into the land of Goshen. · WEB
Joseph coaches his family to say the one thing that will keep them separate, and a nomad in a palace blesses the most powerful man on earth.
Jacob sent Judah before him to Joseph, to show the way. Judah again — the brother who proposed the sale is now the one trusted to go ahead and arrange the meeting.
The reunion is one sentence and it does not describe Jacob at all: He presented himself to him, and fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. The weeping is Joseph's, and the phrase means a long time. Whatever the old man did, the writer keeps his eyes on the son.
Jacob's words are the ones he has been carrying since the wagons arrived: Now let me die, since I have seen your face, that you are still alive.
Then Joseph coaches them, and the coaching is shrewd. Pharaoh will ask their occupation; they are to say they are keepers of livestock, as their fathers were — and the reason is given in the last clause: for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.
The strategy is the opposite of what it looks like. He is not helping them conceal a stigma; he is telling them to lead with it. Because the Egyptians find shepherds distasteful, a family of shepherds will be housed apart, in the pasture country of Goshen, rather than absorbed into Egyptian society. Joseph, who has an Egyptian name, an Egyptian wife and an Egyptian office, is arranging for his relatives not to become Egyptians.
That decision preserves the family. Four centuries later they will come out as a distinguishable people rather than a memory, and the reason is a policy set here on a single sentence about what Egyptians could not stand.
The brothers do exactly as told, and Pharaoh's response is even better than asked — the best of the land, and an offer of employment for any able men among them.
And then Joseph brings his father in, and the scene is quietly astonishing. Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and set him before Pharaoh; and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.
A hundred-and-thirty-year-old herdsman, a foreigner, a refugee from a famine, with no title and no property, standing in the court of the most powerful man in the world — and he blesses him. Not thanks him. Blesses him, and does it again at the end of the audience, so the writer records it twice. The rule that the lesser is blessed by the greater Hebrews 7:7 puts this old man above the throne, and Genesis states it without a word of explanation.
Pharaoh's question is the one people ask the very old: How old are you?
Jacob's answer is the saddest self-assessment in Scripture and the most honest: The years of my pilgrimage are one hundred thirty years. The days of the years of my life have been few and evil. They have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers.
Few, in a man of a hundred and thirty. Evil, meaning hard — and the record bears him out: exile, fourteen years' labor for a wife he was cheated of, a daughter violated, sons who massacred a city, the wife he loved dead on a road, and twenty-two years believing his favorite son was torn apart.
He calls it a pilgrimage, twice. It is the word Abraham used at Machpelah and the word the New Testament picks up for all of them — strangers and pilgrims, who confessed they were looking for a country Hebrews 11:13.
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