Genesis 47:13-48:22
Dear RTB’ers,
Two major stories in today’s reading: Joseph/Pharaoh now owns everything in Egypt – the livestock, the land, and the people – and Jacob places Joseph’s younger, Ephraim, before the firstborn, Manasseh.
Joseph now owns the land and the people, so it is his decision to settle the people in the cities and remove them from their land (Gen. 47:21). I suspect that his major motivation in doing this had to do with the efficiency gained in food distribution during the continuing famine, but that final result – separating the people from their land – makes for a very harsh, emotional reaction from the people. I saw this policy in action on my first trip to Slovakia in 1996. [Recall that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.] Slovakia (actually, Czechoslovakia) had come under the “Iron Curtain” domination of the USSR in 1948 and had effectively been governed from Moscow. I was in eastern Slovakia, teaching in their second-largest city, Kosice, when we were taken on a tour of a “collective farm”. This farm was a dairy farm; I recall a figure of 10,000 cows on this farm. [By contrast, in the United States, most cow-calf operations are relatively small and have fewer than 50 cows though a few very large operations (with more than 1,000 cows) can be found. (https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/107126/cow-calf-farm-sizes_768px.png?v=8986)] The people on this collective farm lived in five or six villages spread out on the farmland property and worked the fields and the livestock and did the milking. The Soviets had taken the land and the peoples’ devastation from that separation had been severe – as Carol and I learned more personally in a later trip to Czechia in 2010. So this is what Joseph has done with the Egyptians; he has become a (hopefully, benevolent) dictator.
As for Jacob placing Ephraim before Manasseh (Gen. 48:14-20), recall that Jacob had, himself, taken Esau’s birthright and blessing. My Study Bible stated that Joseph now received the birthright of the firstborn: “…I give you one portion more than your brothers…” (Gen. 48:22a, NASB). Over time we will see the ascendancy of Ephraim over Manasseh and, in fact, over all of the twelve tribes except Judah (and possibly Benjamin).
Blessings!