Few and Evil Have Been the Days of My Pilgrimage

Pharaoh asked Jacob his age, and Jacob's answer in (Genesis 47:9) is one of the rawest sentences in Torah. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it with all its weight: "The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life; for in my youth I fled before Esau my brother, and sojourned in a land not my own; and now in the time of my old age have I come down to sojourn here."

The patriarch is standing in the most powerful palace on earth, having just been reunited with the son he thought dead, and what comes out of his mouth is "few and evil."

The Honesty of a Tired Patriarch

The Targum preserves Jacob's bluntness rather than smoothing it. His childhood was overshadowed by a brother who wanted to kill him. His youth was spent fleeing to an uncle who deceived him for twenty years. His marriage was scarred by the early death of Rachel. His daughter Dinah was violated. His son Joseph was, for twenty-two years, presumed torn apart. Jacob is not complaining. He is reporting.

The aggadic tradition, preserved among the 2,921 texts from <a href='/categories/midrash-rabbah.html'>Midrash Rabbah</a> in our database, notes that Jacob was the only patriarch to live fewer years than his father. Abraham lived 175 (Genesis 25:7), Isaac 180 (Genesis 35:28), Jacob only 147. The rabbis count the 33 missing years as a direct consequence of Jacob's complaint here — the Holy One, they say, subtracted one year for each word of lament.

The Word "Pilgrimage"

Jacob calls his life a megurai, a sojourning, a pilgrimage. The Targum keeps the word. He does not describe his life as a home, a reign, a career. He describes it as a long road he has been walking without ever quite arriving. Every place he lived — Canaan, Haran, Shechem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Egypt — was a waystation.

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, reaching its final form between the 4th and 8th centuries CE, uses Jacob here as a template for the Jew in exile. The patriarchs are not given comfortable lives; they are given meaningful ones. Megurai is the permanent Jewish address.

The takeaway is not despair. It is permission. Jacob teaches that you may honestly tell the world your years have been few and bitter, and still have become the father of a nation. Meaning does not require that the road be smooth. It only requires that you keep walking it.