The Word Jacob Spoke First

Near the end of the book of Genesis, an old man sits up in his bed in Egypt to bless two boys. He is Jacob, whom God had renamed Israel, and the days of his life have come to a hundred and forty-seven years (Genesis 47:28). His eyes are “heavy from age” (Genesis 48:10), so that he can no longer see. The boys are Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of his son Joseph. In the middle of the blessing he speaks over them, he says a word that no one in Scripture has said before him.

In Book 4 of this series we heard the one line in Jacob’s blessings of his sons that he speaks to the LORD: “For your salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw) I wait, O LORD” (Genesis 49:18); here we take up the word he spoke one chapter earlier and follow it from Jacob’s bed to the end of the Bible.

The Blessing

Here is the blessing as Jacob spoke it, with Joseph standing before him and the two boys brought near.

Genesis 48:15-16 And he blessed Joseph and said, "The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has shepherded me all my life long unto this day, the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be called in them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth."

Jacob names God three ways. He is the God before whom Abraham and Isaac walked. He is the God who has shepherded Jacob all his life long unto this day. And He is “the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil.” Then comes the request, “bless the lads.”

Behind “who has redeemed” stands the Hebrew verb gaal גָּאַל gaw-al', to redeem, to buy back. The form Jacob uses is ha-goel הַגֹּאֵל gaw-al', “the one who redeems.” A goel, in the law of Israel, is the near kinsman who pays the price and buys back what a relative has lost, whether land, freedom, or a name. Leviticus 25 sets that out in detail. It is not a word of the temple or the battlefield; it belongs to the family, and it has a price attached.

Where the Word First Stands

Read the Hebrew Bible from its first page in order, and the verb gaal does not appear at all until this verse. Genesis 48:16 is the first place in Scripture where it stands, and the only place in the whole of Genesis. Across the Hebrew Bible it stands 104 times, in 84 verses.

The word is not first spoken by a priest at an altar, and it is not first written as a statute in a book of law. The law of redemption in Leviticus 25 had not yet been given. The first mouth to speak this word is a dying man’s, and he speaks it about something that had happened to him. Before redemption was a rule for Israel, it was one man’s account of his own life.

Jacob’s last chapters hold another first as well. The word yeshuah, salvation, also appears for the first time on his lips, in Genesis 49:18. Redeemer and salvation enter the Bible within two chapters of each other, and both are spoken by the same old man.

The Line It Starts

The second time gaal appears is far off, in the book of Exodus. Israel is in slavery in Egypt, and God sends Moses with this message.

Exodus 6:6 Therefore say to the sons of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt, and I will deliver you from their service (avodah עֲבֹדָה ab-o-daw'), and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.

The word Jacob spoke on his deathbed in Egypt comes back, generations later and in the same land, as God’s promise to Jacob’s descendants. What Jacob said had been done for one man, God now says He will do for a whole people.

From there the word becomes law. In Leviticus 25 it is written into the commandments about land and about people who have fallen into poverty: when a man has to sell what he owns, his nearest kinsman is to come and buy it back. In the book of Ruth that law is lived out. A man named Boaz, a near relative of Naomi’s dead husband, stands before the elders at the city gate, buys the family’s land, and takes Ruth as his wife “to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance” (Ruth 4:10). Naomi had already said of him, “he is one of our redeemers” (Ruth 2:20).

Then the word appears in the mouth of a man who had lost everything. Job, sitting in his grief, says this.

Job 19:25 And I, I know that my Redeemer lives (chai חַי khah'-ee), and at the last He will rise upon the dust (aphar עָפָר aw-fawr').

The prophets take the word up as a name for God Himself. Isaiah addresses the people by their father’s name.

Isaiah 41:14 Do not fear, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel; I help you, says the LORD, and your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

The word that Jacob first used of the One who had redeemed him has become a name by which God speaks to Jacob’s children. The line runs on into the New Testament, and its starting point is Jacob’s mouth.

What Is Being Claimed and What Is Not

That gaal first appears in Genesis 48:16 is a fact about the order of the books. It does not prove that Jacob knew the later law of the goel, with all its rules about land and kin. This book does not claim to measure how much Jacob knew. It points to where the text placed this word, and the text placed it in Jacob’s mouth.

That is already a great deal. Scripture introduces the word in a blessing spoken by a man about the One who had kept him. The word comes first as testimony. Law, history, and prophecy all build on it afterward.

From Jacob’s bed the word runs through the law of the goel in Leviticus, through Jacob’s other words about Judah and about the name, to the Lamb in Revelation who pays the price, and on to the order in which a person takes hold of the Redeemer.

In English, “the messenger who has redeemed me” sounds like a title, the way “redeemer” sounds like a title. In Hebrew it is not a title at all, and the kind of word Jacob actually used tells us what had happened to him.