Genesis 49:28

Verse 28 closes the long speech of Genesis 49. Jacob had called his sons together to tell them what would befall them (Genesis 49:1), and he had spoken to each in turn, from Reuben (Genesis 49:3) to Benjamin (Genesis 49:27). Now the twelve are summed up in one line, and for the first time they are called the twelve tribes. The Hebrew word, shêbeṭ, means a stick, a rod or a sceptre, and it is also the word for a tribe. Twelve brothers standing round a bed are named as the twelve divisions of a nation, the people who will inherit the land God promised to Abraham (Genesis 12:7) and to Isaac (Genesis 26:3). The tribes are later counted one by one in the wilderness (Numbers 1), and Moses blesses them tribe by tribe before his own death (Deuteronomy 33).

The one speaking is “their father”, ʼâb, the head of the family through whom God’s promises were handed on. In the days of the patriarchs a dying father’s words carried great weight. They worked like a will, and they settled the inheritance and standing of his children. Jacob’s words carried still more, because God showed him what would come to each tribe. The verb for “blessed”, bârak, comes from a root meaning to kneel, and it is used for conferring good on someone. The verse says it again and again: he “blessed them; every one according to his blessing he blessed them.”

“Every one according to his blessing” means that each son received a blessing fitted to him, to his character, to what he had done and to the future of his descendants. The twelve belong to one people, and each has his own place in it. God, who knew the end of each tribe from the beginning, deals with his people one by one as well as together.

Jacob “charged” his sons. The verb, tsâvâh, means to command or to give a charge, so this is a binding order from the head of the family and his sons are expected to carry it out. It is also the second time he has asked. He had already made Joseph swear to carry him out of Egypt and bury him with his fathers (Genesis 47:29–31), and now he lays the same duty on all twelve.

He begins by telling them he is about to die, and he says it in a phrase Scripture uses for the deaths of God’s people: “I am to be gathered unto my people.” The verb ʼâçaph means to gather, and also to receive or take away. The noun ʻam means a people, a body of persons who belong together, and here it means Jacob’s own who have died before him, Abraham and Isaac among them. The same words are used of Abraham (Genesis 25:8) and of Isaac (Genesis 35:29). God had promised Abraham that he would go to his fathers in peace (Genesis 15:15). A whole generation is later said to be gathered to their fathers (Judges 2:10), and Josiah is promised that he will be gathered to his grave in peace (2 Kings 22:20).

Jacob had lived his last seventeen years in Egypt, in Goshen, under Joseph’s care, and he could have had an honoured tomb there. He asks to be carried back to Canaan because Canaan is the land God swore to give to Abraham and his seed (Genesis 12:7). God had told Abraham beforehand that his descendants would be strangers in a land that was not theirs and would afterward come out (Genesis 15:13–14). By choosing his grave in Canaan, Jacob tells his sons that Egypt is a place of sojourn and that their home is the land of promise. His burial there is a sign that his children will one day return.

It is also a wish to lie with his own family. A family tomb in those days spoke of who a person was and where he belonged, and Jacob wants to rest with the fathers who received the same promises.

The letter to the Hebrews describes this faith. The patriarchs “died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off”, and they confessed that they were “strangers and pilgrims on the earth”. They were looking for a better country, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:13–16). Jacob’s sons kept the charge: Joseph and his brothers carried their father up to Canaan and buried him in the cave, as Genesis 50:1–14 tells.

Jacob describes the place so fully that it can’t be mistaken. It is “the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan”. The name Machpelah may mean “double”, Mamre is near Hebron, and the word for cave, mᵉʻârâh, is the plain word for one. Then twice over he says how the family came to own it. Abraham “bought” it, qânâh, a verb meaning to acquire or buy, “for a possession of a buryingplace”. The word for possession, ʼăchuzzâh, means property or a holding, especially of land, and qeber means a grave or tomb. Verse 32 says it once more with the noun miqneh, which is used for livestock and also for something bought: “The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth.”

All of this looks back to Genesis 23. When Sarah died, Abraham dealt openly with the Hittites and with Ephron, paid the full price of four hundred shekels of silver before witnesses, and the field with its cave was made sure to him as his own (Genesis 23:7–20). The children of Heth are the Hittites, the people then living around Hebron, and Heth, Chêth, is the ancestor they are named from. Strong’s gives the name the sense “terror”.

The purchase is recalled here, on Jacob’s deathbed, because it is the ground of his request. The patriarchs lived in Canaan as sojourners, and this field was the one piece of it they owned. It was theirs by an open and lawful sale, so no one could dispute his sons’ right to bury him there. God had promised Abraham the whole land and marked out its borders (Genesis 15:18–21), and the field at Machpelah was the first part of that land to come into the family’s hands. Stephen, telling Israel’s story, also recalls that the fathers were carried back and laid in a tomb Abraham had bought, though he names Sychem as the place (Acts 7:16).

Jacob dies when he has “made an end of commanding his sons”. The verb kâlâh means to finish or complete. He has said all he had to say, and the work given to him is done. Then “he gathered up his feet into the bed”. He had been sitting up to speak, and now he lies down of his own accord, composed and ready, like a man settling himself to rest.

He “yielded up the ghost”. The Hebrew verb, gâvaʻ, means to breathe out, to expire. “Ghost” in the KJV’s older English is the breath or spirit of life that leaves the body at death. And he “was gathered unto his people”, the very thing he had said of himself in verse 29, with the same verb. The righteous man dies in peace, with his affairs in order and his hope fixed on God’s promise, as Abraham and Isaac had died before him. With his death the story of the three patriarchs closes, and the story of the nation that came from them begins.

Jacob’s blessings formed a nation, and God’s purpose for that nation was the Christ. The promise to Abraham was that all families of the earth would be blessed in him (Genesis 12:1–3), and Paul says the promised seed is Christ (Galatians 3:16). Jacob himself had just foretold that the gathering of the people would be to Shiloh, who comes from Judah (Genesis 49:10). In Christ that gathering reaches a multitude from every nation, kindred, people and tongue (Revelation 7:9). Those who were once far off are brought near by his blood and made one household with the saints (Ephesians 2:11–22). And as each tribe had its own blessing, the Spirit gives each believer a gift of his own for the good of the whole body (1 Corinthians 12:4–11).

Jacob’s hope of being gathered to his people is likewise made full in Christ. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), was buried, and rose again the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). He is the firstfruits of them that sleep, and in him all shall be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:20–22). So Paul can say that to die is gain, and that to depart is to be with Christ (Philippians 1:21–23). Jesus calls himself the resurrection and the life (John 11:25–26), he leaves his peace with his own (John 14:27), and he gathers them into the church, which is his body (Ephesians 1:22–23).

The purchased field points the same way. Abraham paid silver for a burying place in Canaan. The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), has by his death obtained for us an inheritance (Ephesians 1:11), one that is incorruptible and reserved in heaven (1 Peter 1:4). He has gone to prepare a place for his people (John 14:2–3). All the promises of God are Yes and Amen in him (2 Corinthians 1:20), and they reach their end in new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13), where God wipes away all tears and death is no more (Revelation 21:1–4).

Jacob shows us a believer’s death. He finishes what God gave him to do, he speaks plainly about dying, he arranges his burial as an act of faith, and he lies down in peace. He could do this because he trusted that God’s promise would outlast him. The land had been promised long before, and only one field of it was his, yet he staked his grave on the whole.

God is the one who keeps a promise across generations. He made it to Abraham, renewed it to Isaac and Jacob, and was still keeping it when Jacob’s sons carried their father home. He is also the God who knows his people one by one, and gave each of the twelve a blessing that was his own.

And death, for those who belong to him, is a gathering. Jacob went to his people. In Christ we go to the Lord himself and to all who are his, and the grave where a believer’s body is laid is held, like the cave at Machpelah, in hope of what God has promised.