JACOB’S STORY comes to a close this week. He lived for seventeen years in Egypt, long enough to see Joseph use the foreknowledge given by God to concentrate power in the hands of the pharaoh (and the same number of years Joseph lived before he was sold into slavery by his brothers).

We discuss Jacob’s blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, in which we see again an elder brother passed over in favor of the younger, and the patriarch’s prophecies over his sons. Judah, the fourth son, is elevated above his brothers, and it is from Jacob’s prophecy over him that we get Christ’s epithet, “the lion of the tribe of Judah” (Rev. 5:5).