Genesis 49:29 Commentary and Bible Study

Isaac’s hope had rested on Esau – this was a great tragedy. If only Isaac had trained them to accept God’s way. Jacob had a difficult start in life – in a dispute with his brother he had resorted to trickery. Then there is the wonderful event at Bethel. He finds the Lord, personal faith. Then he becomes the victim of treachery, trickery. He falls into polygamy, and wherever polygamy occurs it causes untold grief. Most of the ills of the family of Jacob can be traced to that situation. After twenty years (Genesis 31:3) the Lord called him back to the promised land. God stops him in his tracks and meets with him. Yet even then Jacob doesn’t straighten entirely. He builds a house at Succoth (Genesis 33:17), then buys land at Shalem. He believes he has to go back to Bethel but gets tied down by the things of this world. Then there is the sad events surrounding Dinah, Jacob has no rule over his sons. In chapter 35 he purges his household and insist on a better standard of living, and in chapter 37 Joseph has a vision from God, yet Jacob almost answers in the same way as Isaac; he rebukes Joseph. If only Jacob had believed those dreams and trained the household accordingly.Now he is about to die and he knows it. He had already made Joseph swear that he would bury him in Canaan. In his death he wants to be with his people, gathered to them in his bodily remains, as he knows he will be gathered to them in spirit. There Abraham purchased the only plot of land in Canaan that he ever owned in his lifetime – ‘So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, ¹⁶ And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem’ (Acts 7:15-16). There Abraham and Sarah were buried, and Isaac and Rebekah, and we learn here that Leah had also died in Canaan and been buried there. Jacob’s being buried with them was a token of how he sought to be united with them in death and in the resurrection.Jacob knew that God had determined the length of his life, and he could not extend it beyond his allotted span. The way the passage is written, it seems as if he does not to want to put off dying, but deliberately cooperates with the end of life, confident that he is in the Lord’s hands. At such a time all the most important things come into focus for the man of faith. Jacob, as Matthew Henry says ‘would keep in his sons a remembrance of the promised land, and not only would have their acquaintance with it renewed by a journey thither on that occasion, but their desire towards it and their expectation of it preserved.’ All those present would die in Egypt. What then was the point of directing their thoughts towards a land they would never live in again? It was because the land promise was God’s tangible pledge to Abraham’s seed. But if some did not live to see it realised, it was not possible that God’s promise could fail, or that there could be any disappointment involved. Though they did not live to see their descendants occupy the land, they believed the promise, and enjoyed a ‘far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’ (2 Corinthians 4:17). The promise on earth must be made good, and future generations would see it, but what Jacob wanted them to take hold of was the promise of ‘a better country, that is, an heavenly’ (Hebrews 11:16).