1And it happened after these things that someone said to Joseph, “Look, your father is ill.” And he took his two sons with him, Manasseh and Ephraim. 2And someone told Jacob and said, “Look, your son Joseph is coming to you.” And Israel summoned his strength and sat up in bed. 3And Jacob said to Joseph, “El Shaddai appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me, 4and said to me, ‘I am about to make you fruitful and multiply you and make you an assembly of peoples, and I will give this land to your seed after you as an everlasting holding.’ 5And so now, your two sons who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, shall be mine—Ephraim and Manasseh, like Reuben and Simeon, shall be mine. 6And those you begot after them shall be yours; by their brothers’ names they shall be called in their inheritance. 7As for me, when I was coming from Paddan, Rachel died to my grief in the land of Canaan on the way, still some distance from Ephrath, and I buried her there on the way.” Ephrath is Bethlehem. 8And Israel saw Joseph’s sons and he said, “Who are these?” 9And Joseph said to his father, “They are my sons whom God has given me here.” And he said, “Fetch them, pray, to me, that I may bless them.” 10And Israel’s eyes had grown heavy with age, he could not see. And he brought them near him, and he kissed them and embraced them. 11And Israel said to Joseph, “I had not thought to see your face, and, look, God has also let me see your seed!” 12And Joseph drew them out from his knees, and he bowed, his face to the ground. 13And Joseph took the two of them, Ephraim with his right hand to Israel’s left and Manasseh with his left hand to Israel’s right, and brought them near him. 14And Israel stretched out his right hand and placed it on Ephraim’s head, yet he was the younger, and his left hand on Manasseh’s head—he crossed his hands—though Manasseh was the firstborn. 15And he blessed them and said,
“The God in whose presence my fathers walked,
Abraham and Isaac,
the God who has looked after me
all my life till this day,
16the messenger rescuing me from all evil,
may He bless the lads,
let my name be called in them
and the name of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac,
let them teem multitudinous in the midst of the earth.”
17And Joseph saw that his father had placed his right hand on Ephraim’s head, and it was wrong in his eyes, and he took hold of his father’s hand to remove it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. 18And Joseph said to his father, “Not so, my father, for this one is the firstborn. Put your right hand on his head.” 19And his father refused and he said, “I know, my son. I know. He, too, shall become a people, and he, too, shall be great. But his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall be a fullness of nations.” 20And he blessed them that day, saying,
“By you shall Israel bless, saying,
‘May God set you as Ephraim and Manasseh,’”
and he set Ephraim before Manasseh.
21And Israel said to Joseph, “Look, I am about to die, but God shall be with you and bring you back to the land of your fathers. 22As for me, I have given you with single intent over your brothers what I took from the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow.”
CHAPTER 48 NOTES
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1. 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.
3. Luz. This is the older name for Bethel, where Jacob was vouchsafed his dream-vision of divine messengers ascending and descending the ramp to heaven.
5. 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 thus 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 ʿalai (“to my grief,” but literally, “on me,” the same word he uses 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 his 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.
8. 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.
14. 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 ideogram 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.
15. he blessed them. The Masoretic Text has, illogically, “he blessed Joseph,” but “them” as object of the verb is reflected in the Septuagint, the Syriac, and the Vulgate.
16. 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.
20. 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.”
22. I have given you with single intent over your brothers what I took from the hand of the Amorite. 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 ʾaḥad 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 ʾaḥad but ʾaḥat) 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 ʾaḥad, occurs at one other place in the Bible, Zephaniah 3:9, where it is used adverbially in an idiomatic sense made clear by the immediate context: “for them all to call in the name of the LORD, / to serve Him with single intent [shekhem ʾeḥad; 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.