Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 95:380 (Oct 1938)
Article: The Prophecy of Jacob
Author: John Henry Bennetch

BSac 95:380 (Oct 38) p. 417

The Prophecy of Jacob

John Henry Bennetch

One nation rises uppermost in the divine out-working of salvation: Israel. Even from the time that Israel numbered few God was pleased to inform the patriarchs of its unique destiny. Jacob himself was allowed to predict the blessing which would crown each of the tribes. The unfolding of Jacob’s prophecy is the aim of this paper.

Before God expelled man from the garden of Eden, the seed of prophecy was sown. As the generations of man multiplied, the seed grew and produced its first blossoms. The seed of the protevangel passed in its unfolding through the forecast of Noah, the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to the full bloom of ancient prophecy, the prediction of Jacob.

While lying on his deathbed the aged patriarch called to the twelve: “Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days” (Gen 49:1). Jacob had lived an eventful life. During the years his sons had given him trouble. Their conduct led him to study the individual characteristics of each one. In his time great importance was attached to the idea of posterity and their fortunes as the sources of peoples and races. This was more thought of than immediate personal destiny. The idea of a continued identity in families, tribes and nations, making them the same historical entities age after age, is in no book so clearly recognized as in the Bible; and in no part of the Scripture is it more prominent than in Genesis, where the very roots of history are found. Then too there were the ideas of covenant and promise, which were most peculiar to patriarchal times and to the seed of Abraham in particular.

BSac 95:380 (Oct 38) p. 418

In such a subjective world Jacob lived. Consequently he could be expected to act as he did when the twelve gathered about his bed.

The aged father addresses each of his sons, furnishing them with general outlines of a prophetic character. They concerned the tribes to descend from these patriarchs. All of his sayings are brief. But he was not too feeble to draw bold and thoroughly original pictures of the twelve. Sound exegesis reckons the imagery to be flitting pictures with which Jacob had been supernaturally supplied, all of them actually a reflection from his own spiritual experience with the twelve-truly prophetic, but not getting far away from the individual traits of the sons, as so well known to the father.

Two groups are discernible in the careful arrangement of the message. The prophecy concerning Judah forms the center of the first division, the one concerning Joseph the center of the second. Leading up to the outstanding prediction of all, tha...