Before Jacob told his twelve sons “what will happen to you in days to come” in Genesis 49, he asked for his grandchildren, Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph’s sons, to be brought to him in Genesis 48:9.
It’s the first mention in Scripture of a grandfather connecting with his grandchildren. Jacob would have known his grandfather Abraham, but no mention of a conversation between them or a relationship, and the same for Jacob’s children with their grandfather Isaac.
But here’s Jacob asking for his two grandsons, with a relationship already well developed because he hugs and kisses them (10). It’s a happy scene, but there’s more to it than a grandfather enjoying his grandkids, because back in verse 5, Jacob “reckons these two boys as mine” (5), so that, verse 16, they “may be called by my name and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac.”
Jacob, therefore, has already adopted Ephraim and Manasseh as his very own children. Which was quite the move on his part because Ephraim and Manasseh were half Egyptian. They were born to an Egyptian mother, Asenath (meaning ‘gift of the sun god’), who was also the daughter of Potipherah, priest of On (Genesis 41:45) – the city of On being the most important centre of Egyptian sun worship.
These two boys, then, were born into a thoroughly pagan family on their mother’s side, but because Jacob had adopted them as his children, they’d become direct descendants of Abraham and Isaac too.
So what’s going on here? Well, God promised Abraham that he’d bless the whole world through Abraham’s descendants, and now, because of Jacob making Ephraim and Manasseh Abraham’s descendants too, God was already including half Egyptian foreigners as inheritors of that blessing.
So this early in history, God was already making it clear through these two half Egyptian boys being adopted into Israel, that his goal, in Paul’s words, is to have all humanity as “no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household,” Ephesians 2:19. God wants every human adopted into his family, and Jacob adopting these two half foreign boys into his family pictures that perfectly. So does what being in his family brings – as seen in “Jacob’s blessing on Joseph”….(next blog)
