THE END: JOSEPH AND JACOB

Even the most careless reader cannot fail to notice how broken and confused the closing accounts are. In the earlier chapters there is one commanding interest, round which all the rest are so grouped that they fall naturally into their place. But, as the story draws to its close, we pass from a list of the sons of Jacob who transferred themselves into Egypt to an account of Jacob before Pharaoh, from that personal and moving scene to a relation of the public policy which Joseph pursued during the period of the famine, from that again to another intimate scene of Jacob blessing his grandchildren. In great part the piecemeal character of the narrative is the evidence of how in its present form it has come to us from several writers, each of whom had his own peculiar interest Hitherto we have been under the guidance of a special historian who gathered his material from different sources, but who wove that material together with great skill into a continued narrative. Here and there a closer examination shows that he has owed his account to different sources which can still be disentangled; but he has used these with great skill to make a unity. The closing sections rather show the materials taken from different sources and lying side by side. They are not woven together; the one thing which connects them is that they bear on the early history of Israel in Egypt.

1. The Paternal Blessing.

The brethren have found their place, and now the two men in the family, the two men who have made it, are left face to face. And there is something very fine in the instinctive respect which Joseph shows to his old father. He is represented as having risen to the position of being next to the king of Egypt; no he has practically saved all his father's house from death by famine. He and his sons have enjoyed opportunities which neither his brothers nor his hither ever had. He is a great man. And, because he is really a great man in soul as well as estate, he no sooner hears that Jacob is ill than he comes to ask for the old man's blessing and counsel.

The strong family tie has always been characteristic of Judaism. The house-father was counted priest and chief in his own home; and those who owed him life and later advancement were expected to acknowledge it. Joseph was no isolated, fortunate adventurer in Egypt He belonged to a people, and so he brought his sons, the children of an Egyptian mother, to take the blessing of his father.

Perhaps, too, Joseph has recognised the latent power in Jacob since he himself came to bear responsibility in Egypt Men looked to him for guidance; with the usual irresoluteness of humanity they preferred to put the cares of their government on a capable man. And he has found that the only thing a man can do then is to trust God and trust himself and take the responsibility. He has not been in the habit of looking round irresolutely for other men's lead. And that habit of his life has brought him to a deeper respect for his father. It was the same thing Jacob was called to do, and it was in the same spirit that he tried to do it. In the end the government of a kingdom and the management of a clan call for the same qualities of mind and soul. It is only the scope of the affairs in which the qualities are exercised which is different. Joseph has learned to respect the qualities of the soul, however narrow be the sphere in which they are exercised; and so he, before whom all Egypt uncovers, uncovers his head before Jacob.

A son who stands a little higher because his father was there before him, gains a broader experience and a better training. Sometimes he comes back to find his father busy with what he is tempted to call trifling, parochial affairs. He does not always see that it needs the same powers to deal worthily with small things as it does with great things. Men fail at times to see that it is not the conditions of his work which make a man great, but the way he meets them: and so they talk about great transactions, where they should rather note the power of a man to deal with any transactions at all. Joseph saw behind the rough desert coat of his father a great soul working its way to clearness; and he put off his royal ornaments and bowed down before Jacob.

2. The Paternal Experience.

Jacob could speak to such a son about his real life, about the things which moulded him and made him. He feels that he is finishing his course, and he tells his likeminded son about the matters which went for most and had power. It is always interesting to listen while a man talks about the things which mattered to him; because men are so busy that in the crowd of interests they forget how, when they are done with things and things are done with them, there remain their own souls. It is often said that some one has died and left a great deal," while it would be more correct to say that he has taken away all that life could give him, and that only what life gave him is of any final importance at all. When a man comes to the place where it seems as though everything had come to an end, the great concerns lift themselves up and thrust the smaller out of sight: and the great concerns are those which influenced him. Some of them, from the point of view of other men, are of quite insignificant importance: but from the point of view of eternity they are of quite supreme importance. They told upon his outlook and his thought, and made him what he is as he faces the great future. Now it is only the soul which faces the great future.

There are three events which stand out in the old man's memory, distinct among the mists of time. There is the day when he left his father's tent and after a long flight slept a lonely boy on the hills at Bethel. He took his life into his own hands then for good or for ill, and set himself to the task of his life with the responsibility for it in his own hands. Hitherto he has been at others' bidding, and has felt himself accountable to them: now he may well feel as though he were accountable to none but himself for the way in which he bears himself in this new world, where he may go where he will and do what he will. All the world seems to lie before him: and he can choose, with no one who may determine his choice or examine it. That is a heady wine for a boy to drink.

So there followed the night when Jacob saw how near God stands to human life, and when he recognised how there was One to whom he was finally responsible. It is a very fine thing to be free, and, with all the world before one, to have the opportunity to prove what one can do: but, like all other fine things, it depends for its value on what men do with it. There is a great deal of pernicious nonsense talked about freedom, because men fail to recognise that liberty is only liberty to do something, and the value of the liberty greatly depends on what men do. The worth of liberty consists in giving men freedom to choose, and their worth consists in making the right choice. Jacob saw over him One who had the right and the intention to call him to account. He saw God with His claims on men, urgent and never to be put aside: and he saw the dignity and worth of his human and fugitive life to lie in the fact that it was something for which God could and did care. To that tremendous extent it mattered what he did with it

There followed to Jacob the day when he came back from Paddan-aram, " the day when Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way." He lingers over that, not in the modern way of describing his feelings when it took place, but in the simpler way of describing the place itself. And in describing the place he makes one realise the situation. There is the sense of the hurried journey, as men tried to race with death, "when there was but a little way to come to Ephrath." There is the homelessness, how she who made him a home died "in the way." There is the inexorable nature of death, in that he could arrange his lodging and his goal, but the place of the grave was determined for him. There is the separation which pressed the more keenly, for it was on a journey, and he must push on and leave even the grave behind.

That was a day that could not be forgotten by Jacob, when the love which had made life gracious was gone, and gone for ever. He had to leave it behind, and yet what made it so unforgettable was that he could not leave it behind. It made him what he was. He had lived; for to win love and to be capable of a great love is to live. Not merely to have won love, though that is a great thing, but to have spent love, to have given all one's love away — that is to have lived. A man may need to go on and leave that behind, but he cannot leave it behind, for it will not be left. He has given himself away: and life never seems so high and so wonderful as when a man has given himself away.

That has been my life, Jacob seems to say to Joseph. I took it into my own hands, young, ignorant, unfriended, foolish: but I took it as something which must be lived. I took it again out of God's hands, when He came to me in the night-visions, and spoke about responsibility and a possible guidance and companionship. I took it then as something to which He promised an end. I took it in love, which promised much and brought more. It brought life and sorrow and death. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage: but it has been a pilgrimage to an end which God appointed: and I have lived the days to the full in trust in an almighty Protector.

And now behold I die: but God shall be with you. And the angel which hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac: and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.

3. The Paternal Example.

From that death-bed, full of wise courage and imperishable hope, the narrator passes to speak of the command which Joseph gave his brothers, when he himself came to die, that his bones were not to be left behind in Egypt, but to be carried up by their descendants into the land which God had sworn to give to their fathers. The incident is used in the New Testament as an illustration of triumphant faith, confident, in spite of all seeming obstacles, that the final purpose of God must triumph and the promise of God must be proved sure. And such, of course, it is, though there are higher proofs of faith than that. The man who had been raised from slave to vizier, who had seen his father's house transferred from starving Palestine to fat Egypt, might find it easy to believe that everything was possible to God. Faith has stood harder tests in men, who, with all outward things adverse to their hopes, refused to suffer the lamp of their hope to die down. It may be, then, that the legacy of the bones was also a grim Hebrew parable to remind the people that they were on pilgrimage, and that by all the memories of their dead and all the hopes of their fathers they dared not settle, with ungirt loins and quenched lamps, in fat Goshen. To associate such a legacy with Joseph had its peculiar significance, for no one knew better than he the danger against which he bade his nation be on their guard. He knew the seduction of Egypt, where life was secure, against the hill-land, where famine soon starved the inhabitants. He had tasted power and the delight of making all Egypt own the strength of an alien. He knew how these things stole round men's hearts and led them to forget the liberty which is among the hills and the patriotism which loves its land because of the children it breeds, and not because of the onions and the leeks and the garlic which its rich soil is capable of bearing. So he left the legacy of his bones as a double and grim reminder. They were a reminder of the brevity of life, lest the men should live as though they had all time as their slave and suppliant. They were a reminder of that better country of which they were appointed citizens after the purpose of God, although they were dwellers in Egypt for a season. And the people were to live as men on a pilgrimage with their loins girt, ready for a journey, quick to hear their God's bidding, whenever it pleased Him to send them a summons that they go out as His freemen to such a city, a continuing city.

After this fashion the wise-hearted Jewish historian told how the foundations of the national life were laid. He wrote of its outward fate, how it seemed to be the sport of circumstance and suffered sore things from famine, how it was torn from its native hills and lived among strangers under an alien sky. He told how God made kings its nursing fathers, and raised up out of the nation itself men of a dear mind and a large heart. He showed how their unity came, not merely through their owning the same parentage or inhabiting the same country, but through their inheritance of a common spirit which they learned to share. They had their heroes, whose greatness consisted in their unselfish devotion. But, above all, he told how there ran through all their history a purpose which made them look away from earth to God. From the beginning they waited upon God, as men who, having gained much from His hands, always expected more. They were learning how men, in dark and difficult times, could find these tolerable through the power of faith. And everything which God made possible to them became a means by which He meant to summon them to a nobler end, and made more clear to their hopes some braver promise of His mercy.