Jacob Refused to Move His Hand and Told Joseph He Knew Everything

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The Runners Between the Palace and Goshen

Joseph loved his father and arranged his life so that he almost never saw him.

The arithmetic behind it was simple and it kept him awake. If Jacob ever had him alone he would ask the question he had been circling for twenty-two years, which was how his favorite son had ended up in Egypt. Joseph would not lie to him. And if the old man learned what his other sons had done at the pit, he might open his mouth and curse them, and a curse out of that mouth would land.

So Joseph never allowed the room to empty. There was always a steward, always a scribe, always somebody with a reason to be standing there.

And because he still needed to know how his father was, he put men on the road. Runners between the palace and Goshen, going down with news and coming back with news, the whole span of Jacob's last seventeen years managed by courier so that the two of them would not have to sit alone together and let the silence do its work.

He Set the Boys Where the Hands Should Fall

Word came that his father was failing, and Joseph took his sons and went.

He already knew what he was walking into. Jacob had said it out loud months before, in that flat voice old men use for decisions that are already made. Ephraim and Manasseh, even as Reuben and Simeon, shall be mine. Adoption, full standing, two tribes out of one son. And Joseph, who could hear a room, had heard which name his father had put first.

Manasseh was the elder. Joseph brought the boys up to the bed and set them carefully, Manasseh at the level of his father's right hand, Ephraim at the level of his left, because the eyes in that bed were nearly gone and the arrangement of the room would have to do the arguing.

Jacob crossed his arms.

The right hand came down on Ephraim's head, the left on Manasseh's, and the whole careful staging collapsed in one movement from a man who could barely sit up.

The Hand That Beat the Angel

Joseph reached over to lift the hand off and move it where it belonged.

"What, thou wouldst displace my hand against my will, the hand that overcame the prince of the angel hosts, who is as large as one third of the world!"

The room went quiet. That hand had gripped something at the Jabbok that filled a third of the earth, and had not let go until it got what it came for, and the arm it belonged to had been useless for walking ever since. It was not going to be repositioned by a viceroy.

I Know What Your Brothers Did to You

Then Jacob kept going, and this was the part Joseph had spent seventeen years preventing.

"I know things not known to thee. I know what Reuben did to Bilhah, and what Judah did to Tamar."

Two secrets, neither of them ever discussed, both of them named flat out to the son who was not present for either.

"How much more do I know things known to thee! Thinkest thou I know not what thy brethren did to thee, because thou wouldst betray nothing whenever I asked thee?"

Every runner on that road, every crowded room, every polite exit, seventeen years of it, and the old man had known the whole time and had let his son manage him out of kindness.

Jacob was not finished. He had things to say about the two heads under his hands. Manasseh would be great, and Gideon would come out of him. The younger one, the one under the right hand, would be the ancestor of Joshua, who would order the sun and the moon to stand still and be obeyed by both of them, though they run the whole earth from one end to the other. What had earned Ephraim the right hand was nothing anybody in the room could see. He was the modest one.

It held. In the lists of the generations Manasseh comes after Ephraim. In the division of the land, in the order of the camps and the standards, at the dedication of the Tabernacle, the younger goes first, every time, for good.

Ten Years for a Word He Let Pass

Joseph died before any of his brothers, younger at his death than the youngest of them was at his.

The reason given is small enough to miss. His brothers, in front of him, in the years when he was the second man in Egypt and they were nervous around him, referred to their father as his servant. Thy servant, our father. And Joseph, who heard everything in every room, let it go by without a word.

Ten years came off his life for that silence. Dominion buries the man who exercises it.

He had run couriers up and down a road for seventeen years to control what his father would hear, and what cost him was one sentence, spoken in his hearing, that he did not bother to correct.