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Jacob Tried to Reveal When the Messiah Would Come but God Blocked Him

Jacob gathered his sons to reveal the messianic end-time. The Shekhinah appeared over his deathbed, the tribes gathered close, and God sealed the vision away.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Deathbed With the Missing Piece
  2. Why the Messianic End Was Concealed
  3. What the Blessings Became Instead
  4. Josephus and the Land That Was Already Theirs

The Deathbed With the Missing Piece

Jacob called his twelve sons to his deathbed to receive his blessings. That is the plain reading of Genesis 49. What Targum Jonathan on Genesis 49 records is that Jacob intended to give them something more than blessings. He prepared to reveal "the hidden mysteries, the ends concealed, the recompense of reward for the righteous, the retribution of the wicked, and the bower of Eden." He intended to show them the full scope of history, including the precise moment when the King Messiah would come and what the world would look like before and after that arrival.

The Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, was revealed over his golden bed as he prepared to speak. The twelve tribes gathered close. Everything was in position. And then the vision of the final end was withheld. It was not taken from Jacob in punishment. It was sealed, the Targum says, in the way that a door is closed when what lies behind it is not meant to be opened yet. Jacob could see everything about his sons' destinies, everything about the future of the tribes, everything except the one calculation he most wanted to complete.

Why the Messianic End Was Concealed

Bereshit Rabbah 98, the midrashic compilation on Genesis assembled in Roman Palestine around the fifth century CE, addresses the question the Targum raises without fully answering: why would a man righteous enough to have the Shekhinah rest on his deathbed be denied this particular knowledge?

The midrash's answer is that the concealment was mercy. The messianic calculation, if revealed, would have exposed the duration of the exile in specific terms. Jacob's sons were about to descend into Egypt. Their descendants would be enslaved there. After Egypt would come other exiles, other dispersions, centuries of suffering. If Jacob had been able to see the complete timetable of that suffering and announce it to his sons, the announcement would have broken the deathbed. The knowledge of centuries of future anguish was more than a dying man should carry, more than his sons needed to hear on the day they received their blessings.

The withholding was therefore not a limitation of Jacob's prophetic capacity. It was a calibration of what love makes available. Jacob was given everything he needed to bless his sons. He was spared what would have destroyed the blessing.

What the Blessings Became Instead

The blessings that follow in Genesis 49, poetic and oracular in the Hebrew text, are transformed in the Targum into detailed prophetic histories for each tribe. Reuben's blessing contains a full account of what his sin had cost him: "To thee belonged the birthright, and the high priesthood, and the kingdom; because thou didst sin, the birthright was given to Joseph, the high priesthood to Levi, and the kingdom to Judah." Each tribe receives its own complete moral ledger, its virtues and failures laid out in the prophetic past tense of a father who already knows what his children will become.

What Jacob cannot tell them is how long all of this will last. He can describe the shape of each tribe's destiny. He cannot give them the end date. The blessings are complete without it, but Jacob knows something is missing from what he prepared to say, and the tribes know it too. After he finishes, the Targum records that Jacob saw his sons afraid that the Divine Presence had departed because the messianic end had not been revealed. He reassured them: the Presence had not departed. The knowledge had simply been withheld. Both things were true at once.

Josephus and the Land That Was Already Theirs

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing in the first century CE in his Antiquities of the Jews, records Jacob's final scene with a detail that complements the Targum's framing. Jacob foretold, Josephus writes, where each of his sons' descendants would settle in the land of Canaan, describing the eventual territorial allocations of the twelve tribes with the confidence of a man who spoke of established fact. His family was living in Egypt, guests of a foreign empire with no immediate prospect of return. Jacob spoke of their land as though it were already possessed, because God had said it would be.

Josephus also records Jacob's adoption of Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph's Egyptian-born sons, as his own, elevating them to full tribal status alongside the sons born in Canaan. This act extended the covenant to the generation born in exile, the generation that would need to hold the promise through the descent into slavery. Jacob was building the structure that would survive the exile he could not fully describe.

JacobMessiahProphecyTribesDeathbedShekhinahBlessingMidrash Aggadah
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Targum Jonathan on Genesis 49Targum Jonathan

Jacob gathered his twelve sons around his golden bed to reveal the future. But something went wrong. According to Targum Jonathan, Jacob intended to show them "the hidden mysteries, the ends concealed, the recompense of reward for the righteous, the retribution of the wicked, and the bower of Eden." The twelve tribes surrounded his bed, the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) was revealed. And then "the end for which the King Messiah is to come had been concealed from him." God shut the vision down. Jacob could see everything except the one thing that mattered most.

The blessings that follow are transformed from the Torah's poetic oracles into detailed prophetic histories. Reuben learns exactly what his sin cost him: "To thee belonged the birthright, and the high priesthood, and the kingdom; but because thou hast sinned, the birthright is given to Joseph, the kingdom to Judah, and the priesthood to Levi." Three gifts, redistributed to three brothers. Jacob then compares Reuben to "a little garden in the midst of which there enter torrents swift and strong, which it cannot bear", overwhelmed by impulse.

Simeon and Levi are called "brothers of the womb" whose "thoughts are of sharp weapons for rapine." But Jacob's real concern is practical: "If they dwell together, no king nor ruler may stand before them." They are too dangerous as allies. So Jacob deliberately splits Simeon's inheritance into two portions and scatters Levi among all the tribes.

The Judah oracle becomes an elaborate Messianic prophecy. "Kings shall not cease, nor rulers, from the house of Judah, nor scribes teaching the law from his seed, till the time that the King the Messiah shall come, the youngest of his sons; and on account of him shall the peoples flow together." The Targum then paints a vivid portrait: "How beauteous is the King, the Messiah who will arise from the house of Judah! He hath girded his loins, and descended, and arrayed the battle against his adversaries, slaying kings with their rulers." The mountains turn red with blood. His garments are "dipped in blood, like the outpressed juice of grapes." Yet his eyes "cannot look upon what is unclean, nor on the shedding of the blood of the innocent."

Issachar becomes "an ass in the law", not an insult but a compliment. His tribe is "a strong tribe, knowing the order of the times." The Targum says Issachar "saw the rest of the world to come that it is good" and "bowed his shoulders to labour in the law." He chose Torah study over worldly ambition.

The Dan oracle names names. "A chosen man shall arise from the house of Dan, like the basilisk which lieth at the dividing of the way." This is Samson, identified explicitly: "Even thus will Shimshon bar Manoach slay all the heroes of Philistia." But when Jacob sees both Gideon and Samson in his vision, he rejects both: "I expect not the salvation of Gideon, nor look I for the salvation of Samson; for their salvation will be the salvation of an hour. But for Thy salvation have I waited, O Lord; for Thy salvation is the salvation of eternity."

Joseph's blessing is the longest and most personal. The Targum says Joseph "became great because thou didst subdue thy inclination in the matter of thy mistress, and in the work of thy brethren." His greatness came from resisting Potiphar's wife. When Egyptian women threw jewelry at him from the walls, "thine eyes thou wouldst not lift up on one of them, to become guilty in the great day of judgment."

Benjamin's blessing places the Temple in his territory: "In his land will dwell the Shekhinah of the Lord of the world, and the house of the sanctuary be builded in his inheritance." The morning and evening sacrifices are described, the daily tamid offerings that would define Temple worship for a thousand years. Then Jacob gathered his feet into the bed, "expired, and was gathered unto his people."

Full source
Antiquities II.9Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Jacob lived seventeen years in Egypt after reuniting with the son he had mourned as dead. Seventeen years of peace, of proximity to Joseph, of watching his family flourish in the land of Goshen. Then his body failed, and he gathered his sons to deliver a set of prophecies that would shape the destiny of an entire nation.

The Josephus says Jacob foretold where each of his sons' descendants would settle in the land of Canaan, a remarkable act of faith given that his family was currently living as guests in a foreign empire with no immediate prospect of return. He spoke as though the Promised Land was already theirs, because God had said it would be.

Jacob did something unexpected before the blessings. He adopted Joseph's two Egyptian-born sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, elevating them to the same status as his own twelve sons (Genesis 48:5). This doubled Joseph's inheritance and ensured that the boy his brothers had tried to erase from the family would have two tribes bearing his children's names.

The dying patriarch's final praise went to Joseph himself. Jacob spoke at length about how Joseph had never used his power to take revenge on the brothers who sold him into slavery. Instead, Joseph had showered them with gifts and land and protection. In Jacob's telling, this restraint was Joseph's greatest achievement, not the interpretation of dreams, not the governance of Egypt, but the decision to repay cruelty with kindness.

Jacob's last request was to be buried not in Egypt but in Hebron, in the cave of Machpelah alongside Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 49:29-31). He died at one hundred and forty-seven years old, and Pharaoh granted Joseph permission to carry his father's body back to Canaan for burial, a journey that must have felt like both a homecoming and a farewell.

After the burial, the brothers panicked. With their father gone, they feared Joseph would finally punish them. But Joseph told them what he had said before: he held no grudge, because everything had unfolded according to God's plan. He lived to one hundred and ten, governing Egypt with what Josephus calls "moderation", the quality that made him beloved by Egyptians despite being a foreigner who had arrived in their country as a teenage slave in chains. Before he died, Joseph made his brothers swear an oath: when the Hebrews eventually left Egypt, they would carry his bones with them back to Canaan. It would take four hundred years, but they kept that promise.

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