Jacob Feared Egypt Until God Promised to Go Down

Click for full size

The Wagons Came Up From Egypt

The wagons stood in the yard at Hebron with Egyptian dust still on the wheels, and Jacob would not get in.

His sons had come back with a report he refused to believe until he saw the carts. Joseph was alive. Joseph was governing Egypt, and Joseph wanted his father brought down to him. The old man had spent twenty-two years certain that an animal had eaten that boy in the field, so the news should have put him on the road inside an hour. The grain was real, the road was open, the invitation came from a throne.

He did not move, because what he was being asked to do was leave the land.

What He Was Afraid Of

He feared Egypt itself, an unclean country where the fear of Heaven carried no weight, and he had built his life on ground that answered him. There was a stone at Bethel he had set up with his own hands. There was a cave at Hebron with Abraham and Isaac and Leah in it. The Shekhinah (שכינה), the divine presence, had met him in this land and in no other, and he was old enough to know that if he went south he would not be walking back north on his own feet.

So the choice in that yard was not between his son and his comfort. It was between his son and the only ground where God had ever been findable, and Jacob stood between the two of them and could not pick one.

I Will Go Down With Thee

He moved the household as far as Beersheba, on the southern edge of everything he trusted, and there he stopped and offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac, which is what a man does when he is asking a question he cannot put into words. The answer came that night in a vision.

"Jacob, do not fear. I will go down with thee into Egypt, and I will also surely bring thee up again" (Genesis 46:4).

Nothing in that argued with his fear. It did not say Egypt was clean, or that his family would be safe there, or that the descent was a small thing. God promised to go down with him, so the one possession Jacob had assumed he would have to leave at the border was coming with the wagons. The second half of the sentence handed him a return road he would not live to walk on.

In the morning he sent Judah ahead to mark the way, and the wheels turned.

A Bondage With a Number On It

What he was starting had a fixed length, though nobody in the caravan was told so. Rabbi Chakhinai taught that the Holy One does not set limits on kingdoms as a rule, since empires rise and fall on their own schedule, but that two of them were given a term in advance, and those two were Egypt and Babylon.

Abraham had been given the Egyptian number to his face: they shall serve them, and they shall afflict them four hundred years (Genesis 15:13). The count that actually ran was two hundred and ten. Mercy took almost half of it off before the first brick was made, and no one riding south that week knew it. Babylon's term arrived later through Jeremiah, seventy years and then a visitation and a road home (Jeremiah 29:10). Both furnaces were built with a clock in the wall.

A father going down to see his son was also a nation walking into a sentence that had already been shortened while he was still deciding whether to go.

Up Again

Joseph came out to Goshen in his chariot and fell on his father's neck and wept there a long while, and for seventeen years the old man lived in the best pasture in Egypt with his sons around him, which was not what he had been afraid of. What he had been afraid of came for his great-grandchildren.

Before he died he made Joseph swear not to bury him in that country. They carried him up out of Egypt with the chariots of Pharaoh's household behind the coffin and laid him in the cave at Machpelah beside Leah. He went down on wheels and came up on shoulders, and the second half of the promise was kept on him before it was kept on anyone else.