1And Joseph came and told Pharaoh and said, “My father and my brothers and their flocks and their cattle and all that is theirs have come from the land of Canaan and here they are in the land of Goshen.” 2And from the pick of his brothers he took five men and presented them to Pharaoh. 3And Pharaoh said to his brothers, “What is it you do?” And they said to Pharaoh, “Your servants are shepherds, we, and our fathers as well.” 4And they said to Pharaoh, “We have come to sojourn in the land, for there is no pasture for your servants’ flocks because the famine is grave in the land of Canaan. And so, let your servants, pray, dwell in the land of Goshen.” [5a-6b]And Pharaoh said to Joseph, saying, “Let them dwell in the land of Goshen, and if you know there are able men among them, make them masters of the livestock, over what is mine.” And Jacob and his sons had come to Egypt, to Joseph, and Pharaoh king of Egypt heard. 5And Pharaoh said to Joseph, saying, “Your father and your brothers have come to you. [6a]The land of Egypt is before you. In the best of the land settle your father and your brothers. Let them dwell in the land of Goshen.” 7And Joseph brought Jacob his father and stood him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. 8And Pharaoh said to Jacob, “How many are the days of the years of your life?” 9And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The days of the years of my sojournings are a hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained the days of the years of my fathers in their days of sojourning.” 10And Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out from Pharaoh’s presence.
11And Joseph settled his father and his brothers and gave them a holding in the land of Egypt in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded. 12And Joseph sustained his father and his brothers and all his father’s household with bread, down to the mouths of the little ones. 13And there was no bread in all the earth, for the famine was very grave, and the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine. 14And Joseph collected all the silver to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan in return for the provisions they were buying, and Joseph brought the silver to the house of Pharaoh. 15And the silver of the land of Egypt and of the land of Canaan ran out, and all Egypt came to Joseph, saying, “Let us have bread, for why should we die before your eyes? For the silver is gone.” 16And Joseph said, “Let me have your livestock, that I may give you in return for your livestock if the silver is gone.” 17And they brought their livestock to Joseph, and he gave them bread in return for the horses and the stocks of sheep and the stocks of cattle and the donkeys, and he carried them forward with bread in return for all their livestock that year. 18And that year ran out and they came to him the next year and said to him, “We shall not conceal from my lord that the silver has run out and the animal stocks are my lord’s. Nothing is left for our lord but our carcasses and our farmland. 19Why should we die before your eyes? Both we and our farmland—take possession of us and our farmland in return for bread, and we with our farmland will be slaves to Pharaoh, and give us seed, that we may live and not die, and that the farmland not turn to desert.” 20And Joseph took possession of all the farmland of Egypt for Pharaoh, for each Egyptian sold his field, as the famine was harsh upon them, and the land became Pharaoh’s. 21And the people he moved town by town, from one end of the border of Egypt to the other. 22Only the farmland of the priests he did not take in possession, for the priests had a fixed allotment from Pharaoh and they ate from their allotment that Pharaoh had given them. Therefore they did not sell their farmland. 23And Joseph said to the people, “Look, I have taken possession of you this day, with your farmland, for Pharaoh. Here is seed for you, and sow the land. 24And when the harvests come, you shall give a fifth to Pharaoh and four parts shall be yours for seeding the field and for your food, for those in your households and for your little ones to eat.” 25And they said, “You have kept us alive! May we find favor in the eyes of our lord, in being Pharaoh’s slaves.” 26And Joseph made it a fixed law, to this very day, over the farmland of Egypt, that Pharaoh should have a fifth. Only the farmland of the priests, it alone did not become Pharaoh’s.
27And Israel dwelled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen, and they took holdings in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly. 28And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years, and Jacob’s days, the years of his life, were one hundred and forty-seven years. 29And Israel’s time to die drew near, and he called for his son, for Joseph, and he said to him, “If, pray, I have found favor in your eyes, put your hand, pray, under my thigh and act toward me with steadfast kindness—pray, do not bury me in Egypt. 30When I lie with my fathers, carry me from Egypt and bury me in their burial place.” 31And he said, “I will do as you have spoken.” And he said, “Swear to me.” And he swore to him. And Israel bowed at the head of the bed.
CHAPTER 47 NOTES
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2. And from the pick of his brothers. The Hebrew prepositional phrase miqtseh ʾeḥaw has elicited puzzlement, or evasion, from most translators. The common meaning of miqtseh is “at the end of,” but it is also occasionally used in the sense of “from the best of” or “from the pick of,” which would be appropriate here, since Joseph wants to introduce the most presentable of his brothers to Pharaoh. The use of miqtseh in Judges 18:2 in reference to elite soldiers nicely illustrates the likely meaning in our own text: “And the Danites sent out from their clans, from the pick of them [miqtsotam], five men . . . to spy out the land.” It might be noted that this term in Judges is associated with “capable men” (benei ḥayil)—a phrase that in a military context might also be rendered “valiant men”—just as an equivalent phrase, ʾanshei ḥayil, is associated with Joseph’s brothers at this point. There are, however, other occurrences of miqtseh or miqtsot that suggest it might also have the sense of “a representative sample.”
five men. The insistence of various modern commentators that “five” both here and earlier in the story really means “several” is not especially convincing. One should note that the whole Joseph story exhibits a fondness for playing with recurrent numbers: the fraternal twelve, first signaled in Joseph’s dreams, then subtracted from by his disappearance, with the full sum made up at the end; the triple pairs of dreams; the two pairs of seven. Five is one half the number of the brothers who enslaved Joseph; Benjamin was given a fivefold portion at Joseph’s feast and five changes of garments; and the Egyptians are obliged to pay a tax of one-fifth of their harvest.
4. to sojourn in the land . . . dwell in the land. First they use a verb of temporary residence, then one of fixed settlement.
[5a–6b.] The Masoretic Text is clearly problematic at this point because it has Pharaoh speaking to Joseph, appearing to ignore the brothers who have just addressed a petition to him, and also announcing, quite superfluously in light of verse 1, “Your father and your brothers have come to you.” Coherence in the sequence of dialogues is improved by inserting the clauses italicized here, which are reflected in the Septuagint and by changing the order of the verses.
7. and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. The Hebrew verb here also has the simple meaning of “to greet,” but it seems likely that in this context it straddles both senses. Jacob of course accords Pharaoh the deferential greeting owed to a monarch, but it would be entirely in keeping with his own highly developed sense of his patriarchal role that he—a mere Semitic herdsman chief addressing the head of the mighty Egyptian empire—should pronounce a blessing on Pharaoh.
9. The days of the years of my sojournings. The last noun here probably has a double connotation: Jacob’s life has been a series of wanderings or “sojournings,” not a sedentary existence in one place, and human existence is by nature a sojourning, a temporary dwelling between non-being and extinction.
Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life. Jacob’s somber summary of his own life echoes with a kind of complex solemnity against all that we have seen him undergo. He has, after all, achieved everything he aspired to achieve: the birthright, the blessing, marriage with his beloved Rachel, progeny, and wealth. But one measure of the profound moral realism of the story is that although he gets everything he wanted, it is not in the way he would have wanted, and the consequence is far more pain than contentment. From his “clashing” (25:22) with his twin in the womb, everything has been a struggle. He displaces Esau, but only at the price of fear and lingering guilt and long exile. He gets Rachel, but only by having Leah imposed on him, with all the domestic strife that entails, and he loses Rachel early in childbirth. He is given a new name by his divine adversary, but comes away with a permanent wound. He gets the full solar-year number of twelve sons, but there is enmity among them (for which he bears some responsibility), and he spends twenty-two years continually grieving over his favorite son, who he believes is dead. This is, in sum, a story with a happy ending that withholds any simple feeling of happiness at the end.
and they have not attained the days of the years of my fathers. In fact, Jacob, long-lived as he is, will not attain the prodigious life spans of Abraham and Isaac. At this point, however, he can scarcely know how much longer he has to live (seventeen years, as it turns out), and so his words must reflect that feeling of having one foot in the grave that he has repeatedly expressed before. One should not exclude the possibility that Jacob is playing up the sense of contradiction, making a calculated impression on Pharaoh, in dismissing his own 130 years as “few.” The ideal life span for the Egyptians was 110.
11. the land of Rameses. Medieval and modern commentators agree that this designation is a synonym for Goshen. The term looks like an anachronism because Rameses is the city later built with Israelite slave labor. Perhaps its use here is intended to foreshadow the future oppression.
13. And there was no bread in all the earth. The tension with the preceding verse, in which Joseph is reported sustaining his whole clan, down to the little ones, with bread, is of course pointed, and recalls a similar surface contradiction between verses 54 and 55 in chapter 41. The writer shuttles here between the two common meanings of ʾerets, “earth” and “land,” as in his previous accounts of the famine.
15. why should we die before your eyes? The last term in the Hebrew is literally “opposite you.” In the parallel speech in verse 19, the Egyptians actually say “before your eyes.”
17. he carried them forward with bread. The usual meaning of the verb is “to lead”; the context here suggests it may also mean something like “to sustain.”
18. our carcasses and our farmland. Previous translations have rendered the first of these terms blandly as “our bodies” or “our persons.” But the Hebrew gewiyah refers specifically to a dead body and is often used in quite negative contexts. The Egyptians here are speaking sardonically of their own miserable condition: they have nothing left but their carcasses, they have been reduced to walking corpses. The present translation uses “farmland” for the Hebrew ʾadamah. That term usually means arable land—it is the reiterated “soil” of the Garden story—but “soil” would be a little off in these sentences. It cannot be rendered throughout simply as “land” because that would create a confusion with “land” (ʾerets), which is also used here several times to refer to Egypt as a country. The fact that the farmland referred to by the Egyptians is not yielding much produce suggests that in their eyes it is scarcely worth more than the “carcasses” with which it is bracketed.
19. slaves to Pharaoh. The reduction of the entire population to a condition of virtual serfdom to the crown in all likelihood was meant to be construed not as an act of ruthlessness by Joseph but as an instance of his administrative brilliance. The subordination of the Egyptian peasantry to the central government, with the 20 percent tax on agriculture, was a known fact, and our story provides an explanation (however unhistorical) for its origins.
that the farmland not turn to desert. As the famine continues, without seed-grain to replant the soil, the land will turn to desert.
21. And the people he moved town by town. Despite many English versions, it is problematic to construe the last term as “into the towns,” for it would make no sense to move all the farmers into the cities if there are to be crops in the future, unless one imagines a temporary gathering of the rural population in the towns for the distribution of food. But the Hebrew particle le in leʿarim can also have the sense of “according to”—that is, Joseph rounded up rural populations in groups according to their distribution around the principal towns and resettled them elsewhere. The purpose would be to sever them from their hereditary lands and locate them on other lands that they knew were theirs to till only by the grace of Pharaoh, to whom the land now belonged.
25. in being Pharaoh’s slaves. Most translations construe this as a future verb, “we shall be.” But the introductory clause of obeisance, “May we find favor . . .,” does not necessarily preface a declaration about a future action, and the Egyptians are already Pharaoh’s slaves, both by their own declaration (verse 19) and Joseph’s (verse 23). In point of historical fact, Egypt’s centralization of power, so unlike tribal Israel and Canaan with its city-states, must have astounded and perhaps also troubled the Hebrew writer.
28. And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years. The symmetry with Joseph’s seventeen years until he was sold into Egypt was aptly observed in the Middle Ages by David Kimhi: “Just as Joseph was in the lap of Jacob seventeen years, Jacob was in the lap of Joseph seventeen years.”