Biblion Bible Commentary
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The famine years, and an oath about a grave
Genesis 47:13-31
13 There was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine. · WEB
Joseph feeds a starving empire and takes its money, livestock and land in payment, and the text reports it without a verdict.
The famine section is reported with the neutrality of an administrative record, and it is one of the passages in Genesis most likely to make a modern reader uncomfortable.
The sequence runs in stages, each a year further into desperation. First the money — Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan — and brought it to Pharaoh's house. Then, when the money is gone, the livestock: horses, flocks, herds, donkeys, all of it exchanged for bread. Then, in the third stage, the people offer what is left themselves: Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants to Pharaoh.
By the end, the land became Pharaoh's, the population has been resettled in the cities, and a permanent tax of a fifth is established on every harvest.
Several things have to be said and none of them should be skipped.
The proposal came from the people. The text is explicit that they asked to be bought, twice, and their reason is the one that matters to them: Why should we die before your eyes? And when the arrangement is complete they say You have saved our lives! — which is a verdict from the people who paid.
The terms are not extortionate by the standards of the time. A fifth to the crown and four parts retained is a lighter levy than many ancient states imposed on free farmers, and the seed is supplied.
And the priests are exempt, which the writer notes without comment — the one class with an independent income keeps its land, and the reader is left to make what he likes of it.
What the passage does not do is evaluate. There is no praise for Joseph's statecraft and no criticism of it, and Genesis is generally willing to condemn when it means to. What it plainly records is that a famine relief operation ended with a free peasantry reduced to tenancy, that the man who did it was preserving lives, and that both things are true at once.
One sentence is placed immediately after, and its position is the closest the chapter comes to an opinion: Israel lived in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen; and they got themselves possessions therein, and were fruitful, and multiplied exceedingly. While Egypt is selling its fields, Jacob's family is acquiring holdings and growing. The reader who knows what the next book contains will feel the irony without being told: a nation learns in this chapter how completely the state can own a population, and four hundred years later that machinery is turned on Israel.
Then the chapter turns private, and Jacob makes his last arrangement. He calls Joseph, asks for a hand under the thigh — the old oath his grandfather used to send a servant to find Rebekah Genesis 24:2 — and asks one thing: Please don't bury me in Egypt.
He wants to lie in the cave Abraham bought. It is a request about a grave and it is entirely a statement about the promise: the land is his family's, whatever the present arrangements, and he intends his body to say so. He has lived seventeen good years in the best of Egypt and he will not be buried in it.
And the last clause — Israel bowed himself on the bed's head — is the picture the New Testament keeps, of a dying man worshiping, leaning on his staff Hebrews 11:21.
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