1. And Israel journeyed onward. The choice of the verb is a little surprising, as one might have expected something like “he arose and set out” or “he went forth.” It seems likely that this particular verb, with its etymological background of pulling up tent pegs and moving from one encampment to another, is intended to signal that the beginning of the sojourn in Egypt is to be construed as a resumption of the nomadic existence that characterized the lives of Abraham and Isaac. Thus the clan of Jacob does not head down to Egypt as a permanent place of emigration but as a way station in its continued wanderings.

2. Jacob, Jacob . . . Here I am. This is an exact verbal parallel, as Amos Funkenstein has observed to me, to the exchange between God and Abraham at the beginning of the story of the binding of Isaac. Perhaps there is a suggestion that the sojourn in Egypt is also an ordeal, with an ultimately happy ending.

3. Fear not . . . for a great nation I will make you. Both the language and the action of this whole scene are framed as an emphatic recapitulation of the earlier Patriarchal Tales now that they are coming to an end as the last of the patriarchs with his offspring leaves Canaan for the long stay in Egypt. Jacob, traveling south from Hebron, stops at Beersheba, where his father built an altar, and offers sacrifice just as both Isaac and Abraham did. God appears to him and speaks to him, as He did to Abraham and Isaac. The language of the dream-vision strongly echoes the language of the covenantal promises to Jacob’s father and grandfather.

4. I Myself will go down with you. The first-person pronoun is emphatic because God uses the pronoun ʾanokhi, which is not strictly necessary, followed as it is by the imperfect tense of the verb conjugated in the first-person singular. The reassurance God offers—which is already the kernel of a theological concept that will play an important role in national consciousness both in the Babylonian exile and after the defeat by the Romans in 70 C.E.—is necessary because in the polytheistic view the theater of activity of a deity was typically imagined to be limited to the territorial borders of the deity’s worshippers. By contrast, this God solemnly promises to go down with His people to Egypt and to bring them back up.

Joseph shall lay his hand on your eyes. The reference is to closing the eyes at the moment of death.

5. and the sons of Israel conveyed Jacob their father. The repeated stress, in the previous chapter and in this one, on “conveying” or carrying Jacob, together with the women and children, reminds us that he is very old and infirm, no longer an active participant in the journey.

7. His sons, and the sons of his sons. This last verse of the narrative report of the departure for Egypt becomes an apt transition to the genealogy, purposefully inserted at this point from what scholarly consensus deems a different literary source.

8–27. Once again, the genealogical list is used to effect closure at the end of a large narrative unit. The tales of the patriarchs in the land of Canaan are now concluded, and as Jacob and his clan journey southward for the sojourn in Egypt, we are given an inventory of his offspring, a large family already exhibiting in embryo the configuration of the future tribes of Israel.

23. The sons of Dan, Hushim. Only one son is mentioned, but this need not reflect a contradiction in the text, as “the sons of” may be a fixed formula for each new item in the list.

27. All the persons of the household of Jacob coming to Egypt were seventy. The traditional commentators resort to interpretive acrobatics in order to make the list come out to exactly seventy—debating as to whether Jacob himself should be included in the count, whether Joseph and his two sons are part of the sum, and so forth. In fact, the insistence on seventy at the end of the list vividly illustrates the biblical use of numbers as symbolic approximations rather than as arithmetically precise measures. Seventy is a fullness, a large round number, ten times sacred seven, and its use here indicates that Jacob, once a solitary fugitive, has grown to a grand family, the nucleus of a nation.

28. And Judah he had sent before him to show him the way. Judah, who pledged to guarantee Benjamin’s safety (and from whose descendants the royal line will spring), is now Jacob’s choice as guide for the rest. The phrase “to show him the way” is a little odd in the Hebrew (there are two variant readings reflected in the ancient versions), and its meaning is not entirely certain.

29. And Joseph harnessed his chariot. The specification of the vehicle is another strategic reminder of the Egyptian accoutrements Joseph employs as a matter of course, even as he hurries to meet his father, who comes from a world where there are neither chariots nor wagons. Realistically, “harnessed,” as Abraham ibn Ezra and many others have noted, would mean, “he gave orders to harness.” Nevertheless, there is thematic point in the sense of immediacy conveyed by the transitive verb with Joseph as subject, and Rashi registers this point, even if his reading is too literal, when he says: “He himself harnessed the horses to the chariot in order to make haste in honor of his father.”

and appeared before him. This is a slightly odd phrase, since it is more typically used for the appearance of God before a human. Perhaps the sight of the long-lost Joseph, in Egyptian royal raiment, riding in his chariot, is a kind of epiphany for Jacob. In any case, “appeared before” accords with Jacob’s own emphasis on seeing Joseph’s face.

and fell on his neck, and he wept on his neck a long while. The absence of reciprocal weeping on the part of Jacob can scarcely be attributed to ellipsis or inadvertent narrative omission, for in the identically worded report of Joseph’s falling on Benjamin’s neck and weeping, we are told, “and Benjamin wept on his neck” (45:14). We are invited to imagine, then, a sobbing Joseph who embraces his father while the old man stands dry-eyed, perhaps even rigid, too overcome with feeling to know how to respond, or to be able to respond spontaneously, until finally he speaks, once more invoking his own death, but now with a sense of contentment: “I may die now, after seeing your face, for you are still alive.”

32. handlers of livestock. The Hebrew phrase, ʾanshei miqneh, which occurs only here and in verse 34, literally means “men of livestock.” It is perhaps influenced by the designation of the brothers as “the men” at the beginning of this verse.

34. that you may dwell in the land of Goshen. For every shepherd is abhorrent to Egypt. This claim is puzzling because there is an indication in the next chapter that Pharaoh had his own flocks (see 47:6b), and there is no extrabiblical evidence that shepherding was a taboo profession among the Egyptians, as the categorical language of the last sentence here appears to suggest. The least convoluted explanation is that the Egyptians, who were by and large sedentary agriculturalists and who had large urban centers, considered the semi-nomadic herdsmen from the north as inferiors (an attitude actually reflected in Egyptian sources) and so preferred to keep them segregated in the pasture region of the Nile delta not far from the Sinai border.