Genesis 47 — The Years of My Pilgrimage

Today’s Passage: Genesis 47

After all the weeping and the wagons of the chapter before, the family of promise finally comes to rest, and this chapter shows us how they settle into a foreign land that was never meant to be their home. Joseph brings his brothers before Pharaoh, and because shepherds are an offense to the Egyptians, the king places the family off by themselves in the good pastureland of Goshen, near enough for Joseph to care for them through the years of hunger still to come. Then comes one of the most striking scenes in all of Genesis, when old Jacob, a wandering herdsman with nothing but a promise to his name, is brought before the most powerful man on earth, and it is the aged pilgrim who blesses the king, the lesser blessing the greater. Pharaoh asks him how old he is, and Jacob answers with a sentence you will want to carry home with you, that his years have been few and hard, and that his whole life has been a pilgrimage, a sojourning, a passing through. The middle of the chapter turns to Joseph’s long, wise administration as the famine deepens and the people of Egypt sell first their money, then their livestock, then their land, and at last themselves for the bread that keeps them alive. And the chapter ends at Jacob’s bedside, where the dying old man makes his son swear, with his hand placed solemnly under his thigh, that he will not be buried in Egypt but carried back to the land of his fathers. Watch, as you read, how a man at the end of a long and weary road still reaches past the wealth of Egypt toward a home he has been promised but does not yet possess.

As you read, hold this: Aged Jacob calls his long life a pilgrimage and asks to be carried home to Canaan, a stranger on the earth whose true country lies beyond it.

Genesis 47:1-6 (BSB)

¹ So Joseph went and told Pharaoh: “My father and my brothers, with their flocks and herds and all they own, have come from the land of Canaan and are now in Goshen.” ² And he chose five of his brothers and presented them before Pharaoh. ³ “What is your occupation?” Pharaoh asked Joseph’s brothers. “Your servants are shepherds,” they replied, “both we and our fathers.” ⁴ Then they said to Pharaoh, “We have come to live in the land for a time, because there is no pasture for the flocks of your servants, since the famine in the land of Canaan has been severe. So now, please allow your servants to settle in the land of Goshen.” ⁵ Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Now that your father and brothers have come to you, ⁶ the land of Egypt is before you; settle your father and brothers in the best part of the land. They may dwell in the land of Goshen. And if you know of any talented men among them, put them in charge of my own livestock.”

See how carefully Joseph handles the meeting. He goes ahead to Pharaoh first and announces plainly that his family has come, and then he brings in five of his brothers to stand before the king. When Pharaoh asks their trade, they answer without shame, we are shepherds, both we and our fathers before us, and they ask only for permission to live in Goshen for a time until the famine passes. Notice the modesty of the request. They do not ask for honors or a place at court, only for pastureland on the edge of the country where they can graze their flocks and wait out the hunger. And Pharaoh answers with open-handed generosity, telling Joseph to settle them in the best part of the land, and even offering to put the ablest among them in charge of his own herds. What began as a family fleeing starvation is welcomed into the finest grazing land in Egypt, and behind the kindness of a pagan king you can see the quiet hand of the God who had promised to keep this family alive.

Genesis 47:7-10 (BSB)

⁷ Then Joseph brought in his father Jacob and presented him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. ⁸ “How many years have you lived?” Pharaoh asked. ⁹ “My travels have lasted 130 years,” Jacob replied. “My years have been few and hard, and they have not matched the years of the travels of my fathers.” ¹⁰ Then Jacob blessed Pharaoh and departed from his presence.

Now comes the scene I would have you slow down and picture. An old herdsman, bent with his years and leaning perhaps on a staff, is brought into the throne room of the mightiest empire on earth, and the first thing he does is bless the king. He does it again as he leaves, so that his coming and his going are both marked by a blessing spoken over Pharaoh. Do not read past the wonder of that. By every measure the world can take, Pharaoh is the greater man, rich beyond counting and ruler of nations, while Jacob owns nothing but his flocks and a promise. Yet it is Jacob who blesses Pharaoh, and the Scripture lets that stand as a quiet truth, that the one who carries the covenant of God is greater than the throne he stands before, for it is always the lesser who is blessed by the greater. When Pharaoh asks his age, Jacob answers with a humility that has been a long time in the making. He calls his years few and hard, and he will not even call them a life. He calls them a pilgrimage (מָגוּר) magur, pronounced maw-GOOR. Strong's H4033, sojourning, temporary dwelling, pilgrimage. When Pharaoh asks Jacob his age, the old man does not answer with the word for “life.” He reaches instead for this word, which means a sojourning, a temporary lodging, the time a stranger spends in a land that is not his own. Literally he says, “the days of the years of my sojournings are a hundred and thirty years,” and again, “they have not reached the days of the years of the sojournings of my fathers.” Hear what he is confessing. He is not merely saying he has traveled a great deal, though he has, from Canaan to Haran and back, from Bethel to Hebron to Egypt. He is saying something about the whole shape of a human life lived before God. He is a pilgrim, a man passing through, a resident who never quite settles because his true home lies elsewhere. His grandfather Abraham had lived the same way, dwelling in tents in a land he was promised but never owned, and Isaac after him. Jacob has learned in his bones that none of them were ever meant to put down their final roots in this world, and that the land they were still journeying toward was a gift God had sworn but not yet given. It is one small word, but it carries the faith of three generations inside it, and it will echo down through Scripture until it reaches men and women who confess the very same thing, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth, looking for a better country. , a sojourning, the years of a man passing through a country that was never his home. This is not the proud Jacob of his younger days who grasped at every blessing with both hands. This is an old man who has wrestled with God and limped ever since, and who now sees his whole long road for what it truly was, a journey toward a home he had not yet reached.

Genesis 47:11-12 (BSB)

¹¹ So Joseph settled his father and brothers in the land of Egypt and gave them property in the best part of the land, the district of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded. ¹² Joseph also provided his father and brothers and all his father’s household with food for their families.

The son now does for his father exactly what he had longed to do since the day he made himself known. Joseph settles the whole family in the best of the land, in the fertile district near Rameses, and he feeds them through the famine down to the last child. There is a tender reversal hidden in these two short verses. Once it was the father who provided for the son, sending the boy out to his brothers with bread and love, and now it is the son who provides for the father, gathering the aged Jacob and all his household under his care and setting bread before them in a land of famine. This is what it looks like when God’s providence comes to rest. The dreams that once earned Joseph a pit have become the means of keeping his father’s whole family alive, and the boy who was sold now spreads a table for the very household that mourned him.

Genesis 47:13-17 (BSB)

¹³ There was no food, however, in all that region, because the famine was so severe; the lands of Egypt and Canaan had been exhausted by the famine. ¹⁴ Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan in exchange for the grain they were buying, and he brought it into Pharaoh’s palace. ¹⁵ When the money from the lands of Egypt and Canaan was gone, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, “Give us food. Why should we die before your eyes? For our funds have run out!” ¹⁶ “Then bring me your livestock,” said Joseph. “Since the money is gone, I will sell you food in exchange for your livestock.” ¹⁷ So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and he gave them food in exchange for their horses, their flocks and herds, and their donkeys. Throughout that year he provided them with food in exchange for all their livestock.

Now the Scripture pulls back from the family and shows us Joseph steering a whole nation through the deepening hunger, and it is a sobering picture of how far a famine can grind a people down. First the money runs out. The people of Egypt and Canaan spend all their silver buying grain, and Joseph gathers it into Pharaoh’s treasury until there is no coin left in either land. Then, when the money is gone and they cry out that they will die before his eyes, Joseph offers them bread in exchange for their livestock, and so their horses and donkeys and flocks and herds all pass into Pharaoh’s hands, and for another year the people are fed. Do not miss the mercy woven through the hard economics of it. Joseph does not simply take from a desperate people; at every stage he keeps them alive, giving bread for what they bring, so that no one perishes who comes to him. He is a wise steward doing the very thing God raised him up in a dream to do, holding a starving civilization together one year at a time until the seven lean years have run their course.

Genesis 47:18-22 (BSB)

¹⁸ When that year was over, they came to him the second year and said, “We cannot hide from our lord that our money is gone and all our livestock belongs to you. There is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. ¹⁹ Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Purchase us and our land in exchange for food. Then we, along with our land, will be slaves to Pharaoh. Give us seed that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.” ²⁰ So Joseph acquired for Pharaoh all the land in Egypt; the Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields because the famine was so severe upon them. The land became Pharaoh’s, ²¹ and Joseph reduced the people to servitude from one end of Egypt to the other. ²² However, he did not acquire the priests’ portion of the land, for it had been given to them by Pharaoh. They ate the rations that Pharaoh supplied; so they did not sell their land.

By the second year the people have nothing left to give but themselves, and they come to Joseph and say it plainly, there is nothing left except our bodies and our land. So they offer both, asking Joseph to buy them and their fields in exchange for bread and seed, and they use a striking word for what they are pleading for, that they might live and not die. That is the whole cry of the famine in a phrase, and it is the very thing Joseph gives them. He buys the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, and the people become servants of the crown from one end of the country to the other, no longer landowners but tenants who work a field that now belongs to the king. There is one exception the text is careful to note, that Joseph does not buy the land of the priests, because they receive a fixed portion from Pharaoh and never have to sell. We should be honest about what a heavy thing this was, a free people brought into servitude by a hunger they could not outlast. Yet notice that the people themselves do not curse Joseph for it. In the next breath they will bless him, for the alternative to servitude was not freedom but death, and Joseph has given them the bread that keeps them breathing.

Genesis 47:23-26 (BSB)

²³ Then Joseph said to the people, “Now that I have acquired you and your land for Pharaoh this day, here is seed for you to sow in the land. ²⁴ At harvest time, you are to give a fifth of it to Pharaoh, and four-fifths will be yours as seed for the field and food for yourselves and your households and children.” ²⁵ “You have saved our lives,” they said. “We have found favor in our lord’s eyes, and we will be Pharaoh’s servants.” ²⁶ So Joseph established a law that a fifth of the produce belongs to Pharaoh, and it is in effect in the land of Egypt to this day. Only the priests’ land does not belong to Pharaoh.

And here you see that Joseph’s rule, though it is firm, is not cruel. He gives the people seed to sow, and he sets the terms of their servitude at a fifth of the harvest, leaving four parts out of five in their own hands for seed and for bread and for their children. That is a gentle yoke by the measure of the ancient world, where a conquering hand might have taken far more and left them far less. And listen to how the people themselves receive it, for their answer is not bitterness but gratitude, “you have saved our lives.” They know they were dead men without him, and they count it favor to serve a king through a steward who kept them alive. So the arrangement becomes a lasting law of the land, a fifth to Pharaoh, and the Scripture notes that it was still remembered in Israel long after. Once more, and quietly, this is the wisdom of God at work through the man He lifted from a prison to a throne, turning a devastating famine into the ordered survival of a whole people.

Genesis 47:27-28 (BSB)

²⁷ Now the Israelites settled in the land of Egypt, in the region of Goshen. They acquired property there and became fruitful and increased greatly in number. ²⁸ And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years, and the length of his life was 147 years.

Now the camera lifts from the famine and comes to rest on the family of promise, and the words the Scripture chooses are quietly momentous. In the region of Goshen, Israel settled, and acquired property, and became fruitful, and increased greatly in number. If those words stir something in you, they should, for they are the very words God spoke at the beginning over all living things and again to Abraham, be fruitful and multiply. While the rest of Egypt is selling itself into servitude, the little family in Goshen is quietly growing into the nation God had promised, seventy souls who will one day be a multitude no one can count. And the old father is given a gift of years at the end, seventeen good years in Egypt with the son he thought he had lost, so that the very number of years he had raised Joseph before the boy was taken is now given back to him at the close, seventeen years to grow old beside him. His full span comes to a hundred and forty-seven, and the mention of it tells us that the end is drawing near.

Genesis 47:29-31 (BSB)

²⁹ When the time drew near for Israel to die, he called his son Joseph and said to him, “If I have found favor in your eyes, put your hand under my thigh and promise to show me kindness and faithfulness. Do not bury me in Egypt, ³⁰ but when I lie down with my fathers, carry me out of Egypt and bury me with them.” Joseph answered, “I will do as you have requested.” ³¹ “Swear to me,” Jacob said. So Joseph swore to him, and Israel bowed in worship at the head of his bed.

And so the chapter comes to the old man’s bedside, and everything it has been quietly saying rises to the surface in his last request. Jacob calls Joseph near and asks him to promise kindness and faithfulness (חֶסֶד) chesed, pronounced KHEH-sed. Strong's H2617, steadfast love, loyal kindness, covenant faithfulness. When Jacob asks Joseph to swear, he names the kind of promise he is asking for with a pair of words that belong together all through the Old Testament, chesed and emet. The first, chesed, is that deep and loyal love that keeps its commitments long after it would be easy to walk away, the steadfast covenant kindness that binds a family together. The second, emet, is faithfulness, truth, the reliability of a word that will actually be kept. Put them together and you have the sort of promise Jacob is reaching for, a love that means it and a truth that follows through. It is a beautiful thing to notice that this same pair of words is the very language Scripture uses to describe God Himself, who is again and again called abounding in chesed and emet, full of steadfast love and faithfulness. So when the old man asks his son to deal with him in kindness and faithfulness, he is asking Joseph to show him a small reflection of the way God had dealt with Jacob his whole life long, keeping loyal love and keeping His word, all the way to the grave and past it. , sealing the vow in the old and reverent way with his hand placed under his father’s thigh, the gesture used for the weightiest oaths. And what does the dying man ask? Not for gold, not for a monument, but for his bones. Do not bury me in Egypt, he says. Carry me out and lay me with my fathers in the land God promised. Sit with the faith inside that request. Jacob has spent seventeen comfortable years in the richest country on earth, fed and honored and safe, and yet with his last strength he insists that Egypt is not his home and must not be his grave. His heart is still fixed on the land of the promise, the field where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and his own Leah were laid to rest, because he believes the word of God about that land more than he believes the plenty of Egypt around him. Joseph gives his word, Jacob makes him swear it, and then comes the last and loveliest line. Israel bows in worship at the head of his bed. A whole life of grasping and wrestling ends in a bowed head and a worshiping heart, an old pilgrim leaning on the promise of God and giving thanks that his journey, though few and hard, was leading him home all along.