The caravan forms at dawn. An old man. His sons. His grandchildren. His daughters-in-law. Seventy souls in all, according to the count the Torah gives us later (Genesis 46:27).
"Jacob arose from Be'er de Sheba; and the sons of Israel journeyed, with Jacob their father, their little ones, and their wives, in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him" (Genesis 46:5). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records the logistics plainly.
Two details are worth holding. First, the starting point. Be'er Sheva — Beersheba — is where Abraham planted a tamarisk and called on the name of the Lord (Genesis 21:33), and where Isaac received the covenantal renewal from God (Genesis 26:23-25). It is the southern altar of the patriarchs. Jacob does not leave Canaan casually. He leaves from the same sacred ground where his grandfather and father once stood, sacrificed, and prayed.
Second, the wagons. The Targum names them as Pharaoh's wagons — not Joseph's. Pharaoh provided the transport. An Egyptian king sent oxen-drawn carts into the hill country of Canaan to carry the patriarch of Israel down into Egypt. The sages read this as a quiet reversal: in generations to come, Pharaoh's wagons will be the chariots of pursuit at the Red Sea (Exodus 14:9). Today they are the chariots of welcome. The same vehicles will bend in two different directions depending on who sits in the royal house.
Seventy souls in the wagons. An aged patriarch in the best of them. A divine promise still echoing from the night before. The nation of Israel begins its long descent into Mitzrayim — a descent that will end, four centuries later, in a night of matzot and blood on the doorposts, when the Holy One's Word, faithful to the promise given at Beersheba, brings the children of Jacob back up again.