Israel Goes Down to Egypt

Beersheba is where Isaac built an altar and dug a well (26:23–25), and the town Jacob left when he fled to Haran (28:10). It was the last settlement in the south before the desert road to Egypt. Jacob stops at the edge of the land to sacrifice before he leaves it.

The doubled name is how God called “Abraham, Abraham” on Moriah (22:11), and will call “Moses, Moses” from the bush (Exodus 3:4). God says “Jacob”, although Genesis calls him Israel in the same verse. This is the last time God speaks in the Book of Genesis.

“I am God” is ha’el, “the God”. The words echo Bethel, “I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father” (28:13). “A great nation” is the first promise ever given to Abraham (12:2); now God names the place where it will happen, and it is Egypt.

“Surely bring thee up” doubles the verb in Hebrew. For Jacob himself the promise is kept when his sons carry his body back to Canaan (50:13); for his descendants, at the Exodus. God does not say “send thee”, but “go down with thee”.

When Jacob fled from Laban he set his wives and sons on camels (31:17). Now the old man is carried himself, in Pharaoh’s carts. The verse names the carts’ purpose again: sent “to carry him”.

“Goods” is rekush, the word for the substance Abram brought out of Haran into Canaan: “all their substance that they had gathered” (12:5). Abram entered the land with his goods; his grandson leaves it with his.

Daughters are plural, and granddaughters too, but only two women will be named in the list that follows: Dinah and Serah. The count that follows is a count of names, and the unnamed daughters are left out of it.

Jacob himself is counted among “the children of Israel”, the father listed in the people called by his name. The list runs by mothers, each wife followed by her own maid: Leah, then Zilpah; Rachel, then Bilhah.

Hanoch is the same name as Enoch, Chanokh, borne by Cain’s son (4:17) and by the man who walked with God (5:22). Carmi is also the name of the father of Achan, who took the spoil at Jericho (Joshua 7:1). Hezron will turn up again, three verses later, in Judah’s line.

Simeon has six sons, and the last is marked out by his mother: “the son of a Canaanitish woman”, the only mother named in the list apart from the four wives. Rashi’s midrash identified her with Dinah, which the text does not say. Numbers 26:12–13 drops Ohad from Simeon’s clans.

Gershon, Kohath and Merari become the three Levite clans who carry the tabernacle in the wilderness (Numbers 3–4). Kohath is the grandfather of Moses and Aaron (Exodus 6:18–20). The priesthood’s whole line goes down to Egypt in these three names.

Pharez and his sons Hezron and Hamul complete Judah’s five. For Judah to have grandsons by now, the years are very tight; some take Hezron and Hamul as counted here in place of Er and Onan, their dead uncles, which is an inference from the arithmetic.

Tola means worm, the tiny insect from which crimson dye was made. The same pair of names, “Tola the son of Puah”, returns in Judges 10:1, a judge from the tribe of Issachar. Job is called Jashub in Numbers 26:24.

Elon is also the name of Esau’s Hittite father-in-law (26:34), and a later judge, “Elon, a Zebulonite”, judged Israel ten years (Judges 12:11). Zebulun’s three sons close Leah’s own line.

Counting the names gives thirty-two with Dinah, not thirty-three. Ibn Ezra made up the number with Jacob himself; Rashi, with Jochebed, Moses’ mother, whom he held was born as they entered Egypt (compare Numbers 26:59). The list is exact enough that the missing one was noticed.

Gad has seven sons, a large family for a handmaid’s son. Numbers 26:15–16 spells two of them differently, Zephon for Ziphion and Ozni for Ezbon. Haggi means festive, the root of the name of the prophet Haggai.

Serah, Asher’s daughter, is named again in the census taken on the plains of Moab (Numbers 26:46). The rabbis made her live through the whole sojourn: the one who first told Jacob, by song, that Joseph lived, and who showed Moses where Joseph’s bones lay. That is legend; the text names her twice.

Zilpah’s sixteen is exactly half of Leah’s thirty-two, not counting Jacob. Bilhah’s seven in verse 25 will be half of Rachel’s fourteen. Each maid’s line is half the size of her mistress’s, a symmetry that looks designed. “Whom Laban gave” repeats 29:24.

Only Rachel is called “Jacob’s wife” in the register; Leah is simply Leah. Her line is two names long, and one of those two has not come from Canaan at all.

The Greek Bible adds to this verse the sons and grandsons of Manasseh and Ephraim, five more names, which is how it reaches seventy-five souls instead of seventy. The Hebrew gives only the two sons and their Egyptian mother.

Benjamin has ten sons, the largest family in the list. Numbers 26:38–40 makes Naaman and Ard sons of Bela, that is, Benjamin’s grandsons. Gera is a name that stays in the tribe: Ehud “the son of Gera” (Judges 3:15) and Shimei “the son of Gera” (2 Samuel 16:5).

The fourteen counts Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, who were already in Egypt. Only eleven of Rachel’s line, Benjamin and his ten sons, actually made the journey.

Dan has a single son, and the verse still says “the sons of Dan”. From Hushim, called Shuham in Numbers 26:42, came a clan counted at sixty-four thousand four hundred men in the wilderness census (Numbers 26:43).

Naphtali’s four sons close the register. Shillem is Shallum in 1 Chronicles 7:13, and Jahzeel is Jahziel there, variant spellings that the two lists keep side by side.

Bilhah’s household is the smallest, seven souls. Her name comes with its history, “which Laban gave unto Rachel” (29:29); the verse does not mention the other thing the list might have remembered about her (35:22).

“Out of his loins” is literally “out of his thigh”, yarekh, the thigh the wrestler struck at Peniel (32:25). The man who limped from that night is counted by what came from that same thigh. Wives are excluded, as they were not of his body.

Seventy is the number of the nations in the table of chapter 10. Deuteronomy 10:22 recalls that “thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons”. Stephen’s speech in Acts 7:14 follows the Greek total, seventy-five.

“To direct his face” is lehorot, to point the way; the verb shares its root with torah, instruction. Rashi read it as setting up a house of study in Goshen ahead of the family. Judah goes first, the brother who argued for the journey.

“Made ready his chariot” is literally “bound his chariot”; Rashi says Joseph harnessed it with his own hands. “Presented himself” is vayyera, “he appeared”, the verb used when God appears to Abraham (12:7).

“Now let me die” is literally “this time let me die”. Jacob will in fact live another seventeen years in Egypt (47:28), exactly as many years as he had Joseph with him in Canaan before he lost him (37:2).

Joseph tells his family what he will say to Pharaoh before telling them what to say themselves. Both scripts are prepared so that the two accounts will match when the king hears them.

Shepherding was Joseph’s own first work: at seventeen he “was feeding the flock with his brethren” (37:2). He names it before the king as the family trade without apology. “Men of cattle” is the Hebrew phrase.

Joseph foresees the king’s question word for word. In 47:3 Pharaoh asks exactly this: “What is your occupation?” The man who read Pharaoh’s dreams can read his interviews too.

“Both we, and also our fathers” reaches back through Isaac and Abraham to Abel, the first keeper of sheep (4:2). Egyptian tomb paintings show herdsmen as lean, unkempt men of the marshes, far below the scribe and the courtier. That low standing is what keeps the family apart.