Jacob’s Last Words to His Sons

Genesis 49 records the last words of Jacob to his twelve sons. He was old, and he knew he was dying. He called them to his bed and spoke to each one in turn about what would come to his tribe.

Genesis 49:1-2 And Jacob called to his sons and said, "Gather yourselves together, and I will tell you what shall befall you in the end of days. Assemble and hear, O sons of Jacob, and listen to Israel your father.

Notice what Jacob said he was about to do. He would tell his sons “what shall befall you in the end of days.” These blessings look far ahead, past Jacob’s own death and past the lives of his sons, to what would come upon their tribes. That makes the one line in which he turns from his sons and speaks to the LORD all the more striking.

The words that follow are poetry, son by son: Reuben, Simeon and Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, and then Dan. And right in the middle of the blessings, between the word about Dan and the word about Gad, a single line breaks in that seems at first to have nothing to do with what surrounds it. It is three words long in Hebrew, and it is the only line in all the blessings that Jacob speaks not about a son but to the LORD.

Genesis 49:16-19 Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. Let Dan be a serpent by the way, a horned snake by the path, that bites the heels of the horse, and its rider falls backward. For your salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw) I wait, O LORD. Gad — a troop shall press him, but he shall press upon their heel.

Verse 18 stands between Dan and Gad: “For your salvation (yeshuah) I wait, O LORD.” Why would an old man, in the middle of telling his sons about their future, suddenly turn and speak of his own waiting? The next chapter takes up the three words of that line. This chapter looks at the line just before it, because once you read verse 17 closely, verse 18 no longer seems out of place.

Two Words from the Garden

Here is what Jacob said about Dan: “Let Dan be a serpent by the way, a horned snake by the path, that bites the heels of the horse, and its rider falls backward.” Two of its words matter here.

The first is the word for serpent, nachash נָחָשׁ naw-khawsh'. It is the same word used for the serpent in Genesis 3, from the first verse of that chapter: “the serpent was more cunning than every living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) of the field” (Genesis 3:1).

The second is the word for heels, iqqevei, the plural form of aqev עָקֵב ay'-keb, heel. It is the same word God used to the serpent in Genesis 3:15: “you shall bruise his heel.”

In the whole Hebrew Old Testament, Genesis 49:17 is the only verse in which nachash and aqev stand together. The two first appear side by side in Genesis 3, where the serpent is cursed in verse 14 and the heel is named in verse 15. In Jacob’s blessing on Dan, the two words of the garden promise come back to life, unchanged, in a single line.

Now look at what Jacob did. He described a serpent biting a heel, and in the very next breath he said that he had waited for salvation. The promise in Genesis 3:15 spoke of a bruised heel and a bruised head together. The moment Jacob put the biting of the heel into words, he can be read as turning toward the other half of that promise, the half in which the serpent’s head is crushed. What he waited for was not the bite. It was the One whose heel would be bruised and who would bruise the serpent’s head.

The Man of the Heel

There is one more layer here, and it is woven into Jacob’s own name. The word aqev, heel, is the word his name was made from.

Genesis 25:26 And after that his brother came out, and his hand holding the heel of Esau; and his name was called Jacob. And Isaac was a son of sixty years when she bore them.

His brother came out first, and Jacob came out after him, “his hand holding the heel of Esau.” So he was called Yaaqov, Jacob, a name built on aqev, heel. You might put it in English as “one who grasps the heel.”

The name followed him all his life. Years later, after Jacob had taken first the birthright and then the blessing, Esau cried out bitterly.

Genesis 27:36 And he said, "Is it not that his name is called Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times: he took my birthright; and behold, now he has taken my blessing." And he said, "Have you not reserved a blessing for me?"

The word for “supplanted” in that verse is aqav, a verb from the same root as aqev, heel. Esau was saying that Jacob had lived up to his name: he had come up from behind and taken what was his brother’s.

The word aqev is not common in the Hebrew Bible. It occurs only 13 times, and four of those are in Genesis. Look at where the four stand.

Of the four uses of heel in Genesis, one is the promise in the garden, one is Jacob’s birth and name, and the other two are in Jacob’s own mouth, on either side of the line where he speaks of waiting for salvation.

Read the blessing on Gad again: “Gad — a troop shall press him, but he shall press upon their heel.” The very next words after Jacob’s confession end with the word heel once more. Before verse 18 a serpent bites a heel; after it, the one who was pressed presses upon the heel of those who pressed him. The line about salvation stands between them.

Where the Promise Touched His Name

Consider what this means. Jacob was the man of the heel. He was born grasping a heel and was named for it. He took his brother’s place, just as his name said, and he carried that name for the rest of his life.

And in Genesis 3:15, the heel is the very place the serpent was appointed to bite. When the dying Jacob spoke of a serpent biting a heel, he was naming the point his own name pointed to, the place of bruising in the first promise. Right there, he said that he had waited for salvation.

The study does not claim to know what passed through Jacob’s mind. It points to what the text has set side by side. The vocabulary of Genesis 3:15 returns in Genesis 49:17, and immediately after it, the word salvation appears for the first time in the Bible. The man who says it bears the word heel in his own name.

You do not need to add anything to the text to see this. You only need to read the line before verse 18, and to remember what Jacob’s name means.

The next chapter looks at verse 18 itself, word by word: what kind of waiting Jacob confessed, how long it lasted, and who taught him to name the One he was waiting for.