Joseph and the Land of Promise
Jacob takes his whole family to join Joseph in Egypt, but God promises him that one day they will return to Canaan.
Bronze Age ?3000 – ?1050 BC
Jacob takes his whole family to join Joseph in Egypt, but God promises him that one day they will return to Canaan.
Bronze Age ?3000 – ?1050 BC
A famine in Canaan has brought Joseph’s brothers to Egypt to buy corn, but they do not recognise the brother they sold into slavery, now the lordly Overseer of Pharaoh’s granaries. As a practical joke, Joseph has sold them some corn but has also planted a silver cup on little Benjamin, and arrested him as a thief.
JOSEPH had planned to keep Benjamin as bait to lure Jacob to Egypt, but on hearing how ill his father was, he relented, and revealed his true identity to his brothers. He told them to forgive themselves for all that they had done, because it was part of God’s plan to save their family, and then sent them home in waggons laden with handsome gifts from Pharaoh, on condition that they all came back to Egypt to live in comfort.
Jacob was overjoyed, and duly gathered up his family, his flocks and his herds, and set out for Goshen, on the Nile delta. For he too knew everything was in God’s hands.
Later, just before he died, he told Joseph that as he rested at Beer-sheba, he heard God’s voice in the night-time say that his descendants would be a great nation, and that one day they would return to Canaan, the land of their fathers.
But that tale belongs to the story of Moses.