The chapter opens in collapse. Money runs out first, then livestock, and the Egyptians say 18"There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our land." Joseph buys their land for Pharaoh, makes servants of the people, and sets a fifth of the harvest as Pharaoh's share (verses 20-26). Read cold, it looks like a famine turned into one throne's power over a nation's property.
Read against its own moment, the Egyptians themselves propose it. They ask Joseph to buy them and their land, and they ask him to 19"give us seed that we may live and not die." A fifth goes to Pharaoh and four fifths remain their own (verse 24), and the priests keep their land (verse 22). When it is finished the people say 25"You have saved our lives." Genesis reports the arrangement and does not stop to judge it. It shows a hard rescue that the people called salvation.
The next verse draws the contrast. While a nation signs away its land for bread, Israel in Goshen 27"were fruitful and multiplied greatly." Egypt's people give up everything they owned, and Jacob's family, owning nothing in that land by right, grows in numbers. The narrator wants the contrast seen.
Seventeen years pass in a verse, and Jacob, now 147, calls for Joseph. He asks him to put his hand under his thigh and promise to deal kindly and truly with him, an oath reserved for weight. Jacob is dying comfortably in the best land Egypt has to offer, among children and grandchildren he once thought lost for good. He could ask to be buried where he is, honored in the country that saved his family. He asks instead to be carried out of Egypt.
This is Jacob's last act of faith, and it is aimed at a promise he will not live to see. Canaan belongs to other people. His family's only legal claim there is the burial cave his grandfather bought (Genesis 23). That cave is the point. Abraham bought it as a declaration that this family had staked its future in Canaan, and every patriarch buried there has renewed it. Jacob's bones, carried back out of the land that feeds his family, preach his last sermon. Egypt is good to us, and Egypt is not ours.
The two halves of the chapter belong together. Joseph exercises competent and severe power inside Egypt's system and does real good for people who are not his own. Jacob makes sure with his dying breath that no one mistakes Egypt's goodness for home. Engage the world in front of you with skill, and know which country you belong to.
The writer of Hebrews looks back at this scene and names it faith (Hebrews 11:21), a man's confidence staked on a promise he would see fulfilled long after his death, carried in a request about where to bury his bones.
Where has comfort begun to feel like home? Name it, and ask God to keep your hands loose.
Prayer
Father, we live comfortably in our own Egypts, places that provide for us well and ask us to think of them as home. Give us Jacob's clarity in the middle of comfort and Joseph's competence in the middle of responsibility, without letting either persuade us we have arrived. Thank you that our bodies, like Jacob's, are headed somewhere better than wherever we lie down. In Jesus' name, amen.