Week 9: Moving to Egypt

Jacob is a hundred and thirty years old, Joseph is alive, and Pharaoh's wagons are parked in the yard. Everything says go. But this family has been taught that Canaan is the land and Egypt is the place you don't go, and God once told Isaac in so many words, Do not go down to Egypt. So before Jacob crosses the border he stops at Beer-sheba, at his father's altar, and waits. That night God speaks to him for the first time in more than twenty years, and for the last time anywhere in Genesis: Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt. I will go down with you, and I will also bring you back.

Then come the wagons and a list of seventy names, failures and all, and a long embrace in Goshen that Genesis says went on for a long time. An old man who has talked about dying for twenty-two years says he's ready now, because he has seen his son's face. The chapter leaves the family fed, together, and settled at the edge of a country that looks down on shepherds. All they have to carry them through the four hundred years ahead is what God said at Beer-sheba.