Three Names at the End

Genesis 48 and 49 are the last words of a dying man. The scene is set with care. First “the days of Israel drew near to die” (Genesis 47:29), and Jacob makes Joseph promise to bury him with his fathers. Then word comes to Joseph, “Behold, your father is sick” (Genesis 48:1). Jacob gathers his strength, sits up on the bed, and blesses Joseph’s two sons. After that he calls all twelve of his own sons together.

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.

When he has finished, the text closes the scene in one sentence.

Genesis 49:33 And Jacob finished commanding (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw') his sons, and he gathered his feet into the bed, and expired, and was gathered to his people.

Between those two moments lie the blessings, and most of what Jacob says in them concerns his sons and the tribes that will come from them: their character, their land, their place among their brothers. But three times his words turn from the sons to the One beyond them. Each time he uses a different word, and each word looks toward a different time.

Three Places, Three Words

The three are not spoken in the same way. In Genesis 48:16 Jacob calls on Him to bless the boys. In Genesis 49:10, within the blessing of Judah, Jacob speaks of One who is to come. In Genesis 49:18 he speaks to the LORD directly, by name. A call, a prophecy, and a confession: three kinds of speech, three words, three times.

Goel: What Was Already Done

The first we have already met. Ha-goel is a participle with the object “me,” and Jacob uses it to describe what had happened to him. He is looking back. The messenger has redeemed him “from all evil,” and the evils are behind him as he speaks. He does not ask the messenger to redeem him one day. He speaks of a redemption already given, and he speaks of it with his grandsons in front of him, as part of the blessing he gives them. Of the three words, this is the one that points to the past. It names a rescue already carried out, in the life of the man who is speaking.

Shiloh: What Had Not Yet Come

The second comes in the blessing of Judah, the fourth of Jacob’s sons.

Genesis 49:10 The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, ad עַד ad(עד) Shiloh comes; and to him shall be the obedience of peoples.

Here the time runs the other way. The scepter, the staff of a ruler, is to stay with Judah, and the word ad, “until,” sets a limit on how long: until Shiloh comes. Jacob is not describing anything that had happened in his life. He is speaking of an arrival still ahead, and he ties it to the tribe of Judah and to rule. When Shiloh comes, “to him shall be the obedience of peoples.”

The promise is not a vague hope. It is a statement with a boundary in time. The word ad marks a point toward which history is moving.

There is more in this verse, including how the ancient Greek translation read the word Shiloh, and the lion of the verse before it. But where the word points is plain: goel looks back; Shiloh looks ahead.

Yeshuah: A Whole Life of Waiting

The third comes a few verses later, at the close of the blessing of Dan.

Genesis 49:18 For your salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw) I wait, O LORD.

As we saw in Book 4, this line is three words in Hebrew, and the verb qivviti is a perfect form, in the intensive (Piel) stem: a waiting held onto with strength, and spoken as a waiting that had already filled his years. The salvation he waits for is “your salvation,” the salvation that belongs to the LORD, and he ends the line by calling the LORD by name.

This word points neither only back nor only ahead. It spans Jacob’s whole life and is still going on as he speaks. He had been waiting, and he is waiting still.

One Object, Three Times

Set side by side, the three words cover past, future, and present. Goel points to a rescue already completed. Shiloh points to an arrival not yet come. Yeshuah points to a waiting that runs the length of the speaker’s life.

Three words and three times, yet they point to one and the same object. Jacob does not have three different hopes, one for each tense. He has one, and he names that one from three sides.

Something of this can already be seen. In Genesis 48:16, the messenger who redeemed Jacob stands in one sentence with the God of his fathers and takes the same singular verb. In Genesis 49:18, the salvation Jacob waits for belongs to the LORD and is addressed to the LORD. The One who has redeemed him and the One whose salvation he waits for are not set apart from each other. And the One of whom he says “ad(עד) Shiloh comes” is the one to whom “the obedience of peoples” will belong.

Jacob’s last words, then, are not only prophecy about his sons, though they are that. Three names stand in them together, and through those names a dying man looks back over his life, ahead to what is coming, and up to the One he has waited for.

Why Begin With the Past

Of the three, the place to begin is the one that points back, the goel of Genesis 48:16. Shiloh and yeshuah both look toward someone not yet seen. Goel looks toward someone Jacob had already met. If we want to know whom Jacob was waiting for and whom he expected to come, the best place to start is the One he said had already redeemed him. That messenger had a history with Jacob, and Genesis records it.

The question, then, is a plain one. Who is the messenger Jacob called his redeemer? Genesis does not leave us to guess. Years before his deathbed, during his long service in the house of his uncle Laban, Jacob had a dream, and in that dream a messenger spoke to him in the first person and told him who He was.