Jacob is old and ill, and when Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, Jacob's first act is to claim them: 5"Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon are." He roots the adoption in God's promise at Luz, that he would make Jacob fruitful, multiply him, and give the land to his offspring as an everlasting possession (verses 3-4). The blessing rests on a promise older than the boys. It gives Rachel's line, cut short by her death, a double share in Israel through her son's sons, one tribe becoming two.
In the middle of the legal adoption, grief surfaces. Jacob says 7"to my sorrow Rachel died in the land of Canaan on the way." Decades have passed, and the sorrow has never left him. An old man blessing his grandchildren and an old man still grieving his wife are the same man in the same breath, and Genesis does not treat that as strange.
His eyes are dim with age, so that he cannot see (verse 10), and he says 11"I never expected to see your face; and behold, God has let me see your offspring also." Joy and grief sit together in the same room.
Jacob crosses his hands so that his right hand, the hand of greater honor, rests on Ephraim, the younger. Joseph corrects him at once, and Jacob answers 19"I know, my son, I know." He has not mistaken the boys. He knows what he is doing and refuses to undo it.
The pattern runs through the family: Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Ephraim over Manasseh. None of the reversals rests on something the younger one did. Manasseh is blameless here, and he is promised greatness too, since he also shall become a people. Grace has never run along the tracks of birth order or anyone's sense of who deserves what.
There is an irony in the scene. Jacob once stole a blessing from Esau by disguise, deceiving his blind and dying father into giving him what birth order assigned to another (Genesis 27). Now he is the blind and dying father, and he reverses birth order again, openly, with his eyes wide open about what he does. What Jacob once had to steal, he now gives freely.
In the blessing he calls God 16"the angel who has redeemed me from all evil." His life included Laban's deceptions, Rachel's death on the road, years of believing Joseph dead, and a family torn apart by violence at Shechem. Little of it was avoided, and all of it was worked into a story he can now bless his grandchildren inside. The wound is not the last word.
The writer of Hebrews names this blessing as faith (Hebrews 11:21). Jacob stakes a blessing on a future he will never see, on the strength of a word from God he trusts more than the conventions everyone else in the room is still following.
Whose blessing are you waiting to give? Give it while your hands can still be laid on a head.
Prayer
Father, we carry old griefs that surface in the middle of moments meant for something else, as Rachel's memory surfaced in Jacob here. Thank you that you do not ask us to set grief aside before you will use us to bless someone else. Give us Jacob's settled confidence to bless according to your pattern and to trust a future we may not live to see. In Jesus' name, amen.