Week 2 Genesis 49
This is the chapter where Jacob calls his twelve boys together and gives each of them a blessing.
It seems pretty clear to me that some of the blessings are better than others and so I thought a challenging exercise would be to re-order the sons and their blessings in a descending scale. Top-to-bottom. Best-to-worst. But I soon enough realized that I didn’t have enough data or insight or time to do that. The best I could do was to rough-sort them into three big categories of ‘blessings’:
• Negative or unfriendly ones (for instance Jacob tells Reuben: you will no longer excel)
• Neutral or hard-to-decipher ones (Zebulun will get to live by the seashore)
• Positive or affirmative ones (Judah is told: your brothers will praise you (and) your hand will be on the neck of your enemies. And Joseph is promised that he’ll be blessed with blessings of the skies above (and) of the deep springs below).
But even that was too challenging. About all I had time to decide for sure was that if I had a list – Jacob’s Blessings: 1-12 – then Judah & Joseph would be on top. #1 and #2. Or maybe #1a and #1b.
If I was reading the bible for the first time I’d have trouble saying who was #1 (I’d likely suspect Joseph after reading his story). But I’ve read the OT more than once and I know it’ll gradually get clear that Judah – in the end – will reign supreme.
Note: quotes from Genesis 49:4 13 8 25 (NIV)