Genesis 47 explained: Settling In While Egypt Sells Everything

The brothers meet Pharaoh (vv. 1-6)

Joseph formally tells Pharaoh his family has arrived, and the brothers say plainly that they are shepherds who have come to stay for a while because of the famine. Pharaoh tells Joseph to settle them in Goshen, rich grazing land in the eastern Nile delta, and even offers the capable ones jobs managing the royal herds.

Jacob blesses the king (vv. 7-12)

An aged foreign herdsman blesses the most powerful man in Egypt, a striking reversal of who seems greater. Jacob calls his 130 years a pilgrimage, a life of wandering that has been short and hard compared with the lives of his father and grandfather.

Famine drains the people (vv. 13-19)

People buy grain with money, then with their livestock, until they have nothing left but their land and their own bodies. They themselves offer to become Pharaoh's servants in exchange for food and seed to plant.

The land becomes Pharaoh's (vv. 20-26)

Joseph buys almost all the farmland for the crown, and the farmers become tenants who owe a fifth of every harvest, while temple lands are spared because the priests already lived on a royal allowance. The people thank Joseph for saving their lives, yet the result is a whole nation dependent on the king (translations differ on whether verse 21 says he made them servants or moved them into the cities).

Israel grows in Goshen (v. 27)

While Egyptians lose their land, Jacob's family gains property and multiplies. The wording echoes God's earlier promises that Abraham's descendants would become many.

Jacob's burial request (vv. 28-31)

Placing a hand under the thigh was a solemn way of swearing an oath, the same one Abraham's servant used earlier in Genesis, and Jacob uses it to bind Joseph to bury him with his ancestors in the land promised to his family. The last line is uncertain because the Hebrew words for bed and staff are written with the same letters, so some translations have Jacob bowing on his bed and others leaning on his staff.

Key verse: Genesis 47:27

Where Christians differ

Christians differ over whether the chapter presents Joseph's famine policy as wise and lifesaving leadership or as a troubling concentration of power that turned free Egyptians into servants, foreshadowing the slavery Israel would later suffer there.

Something to think about

When someone desperate offers to give up their freedom just to survive, is the person who accepts that deal a rescuer, a profiteer, or both?