A D'var Torah on Parashah Vayechi or Jacob's Blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh
Parashat Vayechi marks the end of the monumental book of Genesis. It concludes with first, the death of Jacob/Israel, signalling the end of the patriarchal period, followed almost immediately by the death of Joseph. The very next book of the Torah, the book of Exodus, begins four hundred years later, taking up the story with the laconic statement, “A new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph.”
It all feels very sudden and glossed over. What happened between the death of Jacob and the death of Joseph? Why does Jacob not seem to know his two grandsons by Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh (“Who are these?”, he asks)? Why are Joseph’s other children not named? What is the relationship between Joseph and his brothers like after his big reveal? Does Jacob even find out about the plot by his older sons to sell Joseph into slavery and pretend he had been torn to pieces by animals?
Like much of the Torah (I’m thinking of mysterious passages like the one concerning the Nephilim, the sons of the gods who mate with human women and produce a race of giants which quickly skips ahead to a completely different story leaving the reader panting for details), the text leaves us with many questions and few answers and simply moves on to the next important part of the story of the Jewish people.
I guess the only answer is that the text, and by extension the writer/editor of the text has his/its own purposes and priorities which are different from those of the modern reader who might prefer a more connected and detailed narrative.
What is the purpose of Vayechi? Let’s look more closely at the central event, the blessing of the two sons of Joseph by their grandfather, the patriarch Jacob, renamed Israel. It has an odd mysterious twist: the grandfather blesses his two grandsons, but gives the primary blessing to the younger of the two. Before he blesses them, he formally adopts them, and crosses his hands to switch the blessing. This has echoes of Jacob’s own blessing by his father Isaac, which he won by trickery, impersonating his older brother Esau.
As Harold Bloom points out in The Book of J, Joseph can neither receive Jacob’s blessing nor confer it on his own sons because he himself, despite being his father’s favourite, never received it; that honour went to Judah, who supplanted his older brothers Levi and Simeon for their unacceptable actions at Shechem. The blessing is passed down from father to (usually), the oldest son. That is why Jacob has to adopt his two grandsons before he can bless them.
The next question is, why is it now acceptable to pass on the blessing to two sons at the same time? You may recall that after Isaac is tricked into blessing Jacob in place of his older brother, the description of Esau’s wailing is truly pitiful. After Isaac informs Esau that he has blessed Jacob instead of him, the text tells us, “When Esau heard his father’s words, be bust into wild and bitter sobbing, and said to his father, ‘Bless me too father!’” To no avail: once the blessing is given, it cannot be taken away or given again, filling the reader with pity for the disinherited son.
The modern reader might well ask why Isaac even had to choose between his two sons all those years ago, when Jacob, in seeming arbitrary fashion one generation later, simply blesses his two grandsons, who are not even twins! And Ephraim and Manasseh also have two tribes of Israel named after them.
This this connection to the later creation of the twelve tribes is the clue to the modern reader and which did not have to be spelled out for the original audience. The purpose of this incident is to give legitimacy to later Israelite history, to impose a pattern of inevitability on it, to emphasize that everything that subsequently happened was at once the will of God and the result of the people’s resistance to God’s will.
Who makes the major mistake that leads to the division of the united kingdom of Israel into Israel (Samaria) and Judah? King Solomon. What is his sin? Being drawn away from the true God of Israel by his many wives who were foreign princesses and who worshipped the gods of their people. He built altars for them and there were even a few golden calves involved! (we all know what a big no-no that is from Aaron’s major misstep after the theophany in the Sinai desert). Cut to forty years of wandering in the desert instead of moving right into the promised land. The punishment for breaking the covenant is swift and severe!
I was explaining the problem with King Solomon to my sister recently (we study the bible together weekly). In a nutshell, I explained to her, when the wise King Solomon falls into decadence in his forty years of rule over the prosperous empire he creates in the kingdom of Israel, he then does the one thing Yahweh had told him and every other patriarch and king not to do: worship foreign gods. Today, we can imagine God saying something like, “You had one job…” He might also have added, in modern parlance, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Solomon rules over a prosperous empire and a united kingdom, and then more or less trashes it by worshipping foreign gods with his wives. The book of Kings tells us that right after Solomon’s death, Israel is divided into two kingdoms: the text basically tells the reader that the ten tribes of Israel folded up their tents and left, moving from what became the southern Kingdom of Judah, where Solomon’s magnificent temple sat in Jerusalem, into the northern kingdom of Israel. Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, as king, presides over a divided kingdom constantly at war with Israel/Samaria and its king, Jeroboam.
A lot of things happen in the next few books of the Tanakh, but the central tragedy is the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and the traumatic exile into Babylon of the Jewish elites of the southern kingdom. The prophet Jeremiah laments this tragedy, castigating the people for their disobedience to God, and emphasizing that their punishment, exile from the promised land, is richly deserved. And he begs Israel to go back to the ways of God, as if to say, “Then we can have nice things again.” And of course they could: the temple was rebuilt in the sixth century BCE and the exiles were allowed to return to the promised land.
By the time the Torah was written and published in its final form, all of these events were known. And the different narrative strands of the Torah were put together by a series of editors, known as redactors, around the year 400 BCE, a hundred years or so after the Babylonian exile and after the rebuilding of the temple.
What does all of this Jewish history have to do with the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh? You may recall that when Jacob crosses his hands and puts his right hand on Ephraim’s head, Joseph objects, but Jacob says, mysteriously, “I know, my son, I know. He too shall become a people, and he too shall be great. Yet his younger brother shall be greater than he…” One can only imagine Joseph’s puzzlement when he hears this, being completely unaware, despite his powers of divination, of Israel’s fate some thousand years or so in the future. And how is Ephraim more important than Manasseh in that future? The tribe of Ephraim was instrumental in putting the great King David on the throne of Israel. And looking forward to even more distant times, a descendant of David will eventually reunite the Kingdom and rebuild the temple again, a personage known as the Mashiach, or messiah.
We look at the whole sweep of later events, we can read today’s parashah as essentially an allegory of God’s intervention in the life of his chosen people and their intermittent wandering from his ways, their punishment, and their faithful return to his covenant, a cycle that repeats itself throughout the Torah and the Tanakh. And no matter how many times they stray, there is always forgiveness and love, just like that which Joseph shows to his wayward brothers.