Israel Would Not Die Until He Saw Joseph

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The Wagons in the Yard

The brothers came back from Egypt talking over each other. Joseph was alive. Joseph was governor over the whole land. Jacob's heart went still in him and he did not believe a word of it.

Then he went out and looked at the wagons.

Egyptian carts, sent north under Pharaoh's order, standing in a Canaanite yard with the dust of the delta road still packed in the wheels. Nobody in that country owned carts like those. Someone with authority had sent for him by name.

The old man's breath came back.

The Ledger of Rescues

He spoke, and the Aramaic memory keeps what he said as a list, the way a man counts up what he has been carried through.

"Many benefits has the Lord wrought for me. He delivered me from the hand of Esau, and from the hand of Laban, and from the hands of the Canaanites who pursued me."

Three names. Three near deaths. Esau on the road with four hundred men behind him after the stolen blessing. Laban riding out of Haran with his kinsmen and his grievance. The Canaanites who closed in on the household after Shechem, when Jacob told his sons they had made him a stench among the people of the land and he expected to be cut down for it.

"And many consolations have I seen, and have expected to see."

He knew what to expect by now. A man rescued three times keeps a running account of what heaven is willing to do for him, and he stops asking for anything outside it.

The One He Had Stopped Expecting

"But this I had not expected, that Joseph my son should yet be alive."

The coat had come back to him soaked through and torn, and he had made his own ruling on it. An animal. He had pushed away every comfort the household offered and said he would go down to the grave mourning, and then he had done exactly that for years, in front of all of them, every day.

The brothers stood in the yard while he said the sentence out loud. Not one of them said anything about the coat.

Before I Die

"I will go now, and behold him before I die."

Not more years. Not the governorship or Pharaoh's favor or the grain that had brought his sons south twice already. One look, and then he would be free to finish dying.

More than a son waited at the other end of that road. Before the famine years came up over Egypt, while the storehouses were still filling, Joseph had fathered two boys on Asenath, who had been raised in the house of Potiphera, prince of Tanis. Manasseh and Ephraim were born into the plenty. They could walk and talk by the time the wagons rolled north.

Jacob did not know their names. He was going anyway.

Servants loaded the carts. The household that had spent years in mourning over a piece of cloth packed itself for Egypt, and the old man set out toward the one rescue he had never put on the list.