The Abraham cycle of Genesis ended in ch. 25 with Abraham's burial at Machpelah. Yet at the end of the much shorter Isaac cycle, in ch. 28 we had not reached the end of Isaac's life (indeed we have only just now buried him), although he is no longer an active character after that. What about Jacob, and where does "Jacob's story" end?
I am going to call the passage we have just read the end of the Jacob cycle but arguably it isn't, because Jacob remains alive and is a participant in the story all the way to the end of the book. The reason is simply that what comes next is the story of his favourite son Joseph who now becomes the narrative's centre of gravity and carries the saga forward, so that while Jacob is still in the story it is no longer centred around him as it was; but he is still there.
To be sure, it is a changed Jacob (and not only in name) from the youthful fellow about whom we read until after his return to Canaan, and it is only to be expected that he would be, for people do change, mature, age and adopt different roles in life. Now he is less eager to take rash initiatives or speak his mind (37:11 w'aviw shamar et haddavar), and more circumspect and cautious (37:14 wahashivéni davar). With Joseph gone, he is even more protective of Benjamin; and when all the others have left for Egypt he stays put until he is sent for. Long after he stops being the breadwinner he continues to be the father figure to his sons; witness Joseph's incessant question (ch. 43, 45) ha‛od avikhem xay, ha‛odénnu xay, ha‛od avi xay 'Is my father still alive??' and the brothers' worry lest they send their father to an early grave (exacerbated by a guilty conscience) if they should let Benjamin slip out of their hands too.
In terms of chapters, Jacob makes it almost as far through Genesis as Joseph does, only finally dying at the end of ch. 49, while Joseph's death and burial, with which the book ends, comes barely a couple of dozen verses later. In one sense it can therefore be argued that the whole of the second half of Genesis is the story of Jacob (whose birth is described in ch. 25). That would mean considering Joseph's story to be an extended sub-story embedded within Jacob's story, a little as Dinah's story is a much briefer one.
As a matter of fact, we should note that the next passage we will read (which I am ascribing to the Joseph cycle from the beginning of the chapter, though some may disagree) begins with these words (37:1-2a): wayyéshev ya‛aqov b'érétz m'gure aviw b'éretz k'ná‛an. élle tol'dot ya‛aqov... 'Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan. This, then, is the line of Jacob...' It might not have read any different if, in fact, what we have read in the last ten chapters were just the preliminaries of Jacob's life story, and now that he is at last settled in Canaan, the real story begins; except that the translation of tol'dot, which is notoriously ambiguous, would perhaps not have been "line" but "story". So the question is: does these are the generations of Jacob (to leave it in the older and vaguer traditional European rendering) actually refer to the story that has just ended or the one that is now starting? Take your choice.
Metaphorically, the Jacob cycle that we have just concluded (the "smaller Jacob cycle") might be thought of as the story of how Jacob turned into Israel. It has been told as a series of "struggles": first the struggle with Esau, then the struggle with Laban, followed by what some interpret as a struggle with God, and most recently the struggle with Shechem. Perhaps the manner in which he has come through all of these challenges hasn't always been glorious or elegant; but come through he has, and at last he has returned to Mamre, the place from which he started and the one for which he had been heading. His life, which seemed to always be in a continuous state of flux or provisionality, forever on the move or in temporary residence, now settles down into a state of balance and stability in his father's (Isaac's) house (35:27): wayyavo ya‛aqov el yitzxaq aviw mamre qiryat ha'arba‛ hi xevron asher gar sham avraham w'yitzxaq 'And Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre, at Kiriath-arba - now Hebron - where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned.'
They say that you can never go home. Perhaps Jacob did, for a while. We are not told how many years Jacob and his family remained at Kiriath-arba (now Hebron) after his father Isaac passed away; a few, perhaps, but the narrative does not dwell on them. The book says nothing about these years; perhaps there was nothing worth telling. In much the same way as modern writers, the writers of Genesis deny us even a single scene of quiet bliss in Jacob and Leah's household; after the long journey towards the yearned-for goal we never actually get to see the married couple living happily ever after. In Genesis, this gap is deftly bridged by the relatively tedious account of the annals of Edom that we have just finished reading. If it felt like it was a little long, who knows if that wasn't the narrator's subliminal way of saying: "...and a long time passed..."
When the curtain rises again on the Jacob ben Isaac ben Abraham family at their family home in Mamre, the story resumes smoothly, it seems at first, with a sketch of the boy Joseph, who is a dreamer and a little crazy. But with consummate economy, rather than just paint an idyllic scene, what the author is really doing here is set us up, already, for some key events just round the corner, and those key events are going to take the form of trouble. From almost the start of ch. 37 Joseph's dreams are troubling to his brothers, and indeed even to their father. Grey clouds appear on the horizon, which will very soon start rollng in and the coming storm will turn everything upside down before anything is able to come to rest on its feet once again, and when it does - we will be somewhere else. And that will be the story of Joseph. And while the narrator of Genesis doesn't let on, once we read on beyond the end of Genesis we will immediately realise that narratively it could not have been any other way, because what happens at Dothan, unbeknownst to any of the actors, is essential to what will happen in Exodus; without Joseph's story there would be no Moses' story.
Thematically this is certainly a, and perhaps the, fundamental message of Joseph's story. Joseph's story is actually the story of all twelve brothers, not just of Joseph; it tells the story of how the entire family went from Canaan to Egypt in a time of great famine, and thereby (retrospectively) set the stage for the emergence of an Israelite nation. Joseph was the means by which that migration came about. Yet his ten older brothers were no less the means by which Joseph could become the means; if they had not acted as they did at Dothan, in the short term Joseph would have returned to Mamre, in the middle term the whole family might have succumbed to the impending seven-year famine, and even if they had survived that they wouldn't have settled in Egypt and Moses would not have had a people to tell Pharaoh he must let go. Of course, nobody knew any of that at the time; only God knew, and that is the deeper lesson of this story.
Joseph understood this. Clearly the author did too, for the story puts the words in Joseph's mouth to explain it to his brothers at the dramatic climax (45:5):
w'‛atta al te‛atz'vu w'al yixar b'‛enekhem ki m'khartem oti hénna ki l'mixya sh'laxáni elohim lifnekhem
Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.Moral of the story: we have a purpose in life which we cannot always know. Even our basest acts may serve for something good. Even our greatest suffering may be for something, though we know not what. And this may be leading somewhere, though it is not clear to us where we are going. These are words of hope and of consolation; they are human thoughts, because it is humans who need them when darkness sets in and the sun is hidden from sight. People have found courage and inspiration in such thoughts. The Genesis narrative expresses them - in the form of a story. So make yourselves comfortable, and we shall begin.
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