Week 4 Genesis 49
Jacob gave a short forecast of his son Zebulun’s future: he will settle on the shores of the sea and will be a harbor for ships: his border will extend to Sidon. He’s the only brother who gets this kind of specific geographic detail.
I check a wordbook for Zebulun. I want to see what happened. The name is used about 47 times in the bible.
One passage says that Zebulun will benefit from the riches of the sea.
Isaiah says that the land of Zebulun lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the sea.
Other than these two I don’t find anything about Maritime Zebulun. And even these don’t help very much.
I look at a map of Israel’s tribal divisions in the back of my bible. Up in the north about midway between the Mediterranean Sea (to the west) and the Sea of Galilee I see his name in red capital letters: ZEBULUN. There aren’t any tribal border lines so on this map Zebulun maybe stretched west to the Mediterranean coast…and even east to the inland Sea of Galilee. I look at another map. This second cartographer seemed pretty sure about tribal borders and showed Zebulun as being as landlocked as Mongolia. No Mediterranean coast. No shores-of-Galilee. No sea or harbors or ships.
My extra homework on Zebulun didn’t really help and so I’m left wondering how Jacob’s marine-focused forecast panned out for Zebulun.
Note: quotes from Genesis 49:13 Deuteronomy 33:19 Isaiah 9:1 (NLT)