Scrollers Preview - Vayechi

When a matriarch or patriarch in a family dies, there are often a big questions looming over the surviving family members – how will this family continue? Will the siblings and the cousins continue to live in relationship with one another? Who will gather the family for holiday meals, now that Mom is no longer alive? We end the book of Genesis with a similar sense of anxiety. What will the future of this family look like?

Jacob offers his answers when he gathers the brothers together for his death bed “blessing,” announcing that he will tell them, “what is to befall you in the days to come.” While many of his blessings really sound like curses, and several of them focus on past missteps of brothers like Reuben and Simeon, Jacob does eventually turn toward the future. Judah and Joseph seem to fare the best, as Jacob blesses them with royalty and fertility.

These blessings bring some hope, but they are referring to a future that is hard to see. The blessings refer to tribes living in their own land, yet the brothers and their families are now settled in Egypt with no clear sense of when or how they will make their way back to their homeland.

Whereas in last week’s parasha, there was a sense of safety and security in the family’s being able to settle in Egypt during the famine, in this week’s parasha, Egypt starts to feel like a trap. After Jacob’s death, Joseph has to get permission to bury his father in Canaan, and an enormous entourage of Egyptian officials accompanies him. The kids and flocks stay back in Egypt. Pharaoh makes it clear where he wants Joseph and his family to be.

As Joseph is dying, a sinister shadow starts to move over the story. Joseph tells his brothers that “God will surely take notice of you and bring you up from this land.” (50:24) And he makes them swear to bring his bones up with them. Does this mean that God has stopped noticing them for now?

By the end of the book, it is clear that we are not leaving Egypt any time soon. We are left with an image of waiting, as Joseph’s body is “embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.” (50:26)  We will find out next week that it is quiet a long wait before those bones are finally carried up out of Egypt.