Route 66: Day 17; Genesis 48-50

"Listen my children and you shall hear..."

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Landmark
The reading of the will. In honor of the occasion, Jacob has written a poem. Oh, goody. Can you just see his children rolling their eyes thinking,  "Just get to the good stuff, Dad."  Regardless, how they or we feel about poetry, Jacob used this method to recount each son's character and to pass along a view of their future. 

Hebrew poetry translated to English kind of looses its charm but we can still get the message--The birthright passes over the firstborn, Reuben, for his act of defiling his father's 'wife', right past Simeon and Levi who also suffered from poor 'hold back' only theirs had to do with anger and violence  and finally landing on Judah, the fourth in line. His is the family line Jesus will come from-- the whole " scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from his descendants, until the coming of the one to whom it belongs, the one whom all nations will honor"  part. [49:10 NLT]  Very exciting news for Judah. Then, Zed will provide safe harbor for ships, Issie will become a slave, Dan will judge, Gad will have street savvy, Asher will be an re-nown chef, Naphtali would speak words of grace (had to research that one.  Maybe a poet in his own right.), Joe who started out with all those wild dreams actually did turn out to be an excellent leader and was blessed beyond compare. And lastly Ben, well, sadly he gets the leftovers, whatever that means.

Can you imagine teenagers in Hebrew class reciting this as if it were The Last Ride of Paul Revere? Maybe not, but the images found in this poem would get their point across to the Hebrew audience. I wonder what Jacob would have said about me if only we had been acquainted?  Perhaps in our language it would sound something like this--

There once was a girl named Patty,
Who for part of her youth she was bratty.
Then Jesus came in and forgave all her sin,
and now about Him she's quite chatty.

Hope, you enjoyed the poetry lesson. Tomorrow, on to the exodus. One book completed! It has been great fun discovering what God intended to show me along the way.  Hope you are having the same success.