Day 16 --Genesis 48-50

Ancient Israel placed boundless store by deathbed blessings. They had the binding power of a last will and testament. A father’s blessing given to favored son not only insured his rights of inheritance, it also provided a surge of spiritual power that carried him through his life, and continued to bring a special measure of luck and happiness to his descendants throughout many generations.
In the reading for today, at the climax of a long string of these benedictions, Jacob says—“The blessings of your father are stronger than the blessings of the eternal mountains, and the bounties of the everlasting hills; may they be on the head of Joseph and the brow of him who was set apart from his brothers” (49:26). Joseph is the Chosen among the chosen—his father’s final blessing seals his position as the Child of Promise. And his status is ratified when he sees to the burial of his father, the last duty of a faithful son (50:1ff).
We have already encountered the story of how Esau lost Isaac’s last blessing to Jacob in Chapter 27 by trickery. Now Jacob takes no chances in granting his own final blessings—some enthusiastic and others guarded and ambiguous—to his sons.
The people of Israel would see Jacob’s last blessings worked out in the subsequent history of the Family of Promise. The character of Jacob’s sons—their weaknesses and their virtues—are passed down as an inheritance to the tribes that bear their names.
So these deathbed blessings granted to the one who gave them a measure of earthly immortality. When Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh he says, “In them let my name be perpetuated, and the name of my ancestors Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude on the earth” (48:16).
We modern people do not give enough thought to the influence—for good and for evil—that past actions have upon the present and the future. That the weight of the past is both a blessing and a curse is one of the recurring themes of the Bible narrative, however. Actions—both evil and good—influence not just the destiny of the one who performs them, but also that of his or her children’s children, generations into the future. And words of blessing and curse, once spoken, become real things that do not pass out of existence like a puff of a wind. Words endure, long outlasting the one who speaks them.
So in the Bible narrative blessings and curses have an objective influence upon the destiny of persons and families. They have spiritual weight and significance that we modern people have to struggle to fully appreciate. But the modern science of genetics testifies to an ancient truth—each of us carries the record of all our fathers and mothers. The past never really dies. And history testifies that actions, even those performed very long ago, continue to have real consequences in the present and the potential for creating both happiness and tragedy in the future.