Genesis 46-50: the Twelve Tribes of Israel and more family trouble brewing?

So, with Joseph having duly loaded up his brothers with food to see them through a journey in famine-stricken territory, Jacob decides that he wants to see the son he thought was dead.
The entire family decamps to Egypt, which gives an opportunity to list all of Jacob's sons and grandsons, which include the wonderfully named Huppim and Muppim, two of the many sons of Benjamin. They all settle in a land called Goshen, the whereabouts of which seem to be a bit hazy but is somewhere in the Nile Delta.
The famine, however, continues, and with his distinctly profit-oriented mind Joseph manages to get the desperate population of Egypt to swap first their cattle and horses and then all their land for bread, effectively reducing them all to sharecroppers:

"The Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.
And it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones."
(Ch 47 v23-24)

Meanwhile, the dying Jacob calls Joseph to his bed and gives his blessing to Joseph's younger son Ephraim, instead of to the older Manasseh. You'd think, after the trouble that this kind of thing caused with first Ishmael and Isaac and then Esau and Jacob himself that people in this family would leave off giving complicated blessings, but apparently not.
Jacob also calls all of his other sons to him and decides to enumerate their failings and virtues, including Reuben's 'instability' (for sleeping with one of his father's concubines) abd Simeon and Levi's 'cruelty' (at last these two are getting some come-uppance for going around stabbing people left right and centre.) Judah, Zebelun and Issachar are apparently all ok, while the rest of the sons - Dan, Gad, Naphthali and Benjamin - all get rather ambivalent reviews, including:

"Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward."
(Ch 49 v17)

and:

"Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil."
(Ch 49 v27)

And so are listed the Twelve Tribes of Israel, setting a framework for many of the political and religious developments of the rest of the Old Testament.
Like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob's own first wife Leah, Jacob himself is buried at the tomb in Hebron built on land bought by Abraham. This is also described as being near Mamre, an intriguing site which is mentioned at a number of points in Genesis and seems connected with Sarah and Rebekah. The archaeological record suggests that it was an ancient cult site from bronze age times, prior to the eras associated with Biblical figures insofar as Old Testament characters can be identified with pre/historic periods, and which continued as a religious shrine under Jewish, Roman, Muslim and Crusader Christian rule. Christian pilgrims seem to have managed to destroy the last remains of the ancient


tree which was associated with the site. There is a nice little discussion of whether the trees actually associated with the site were oaks or terebinths here. Terebinths, by the way, may sound grand but are also the source material for turpentine, which is less swanky sounding.
As so, with a grand act of final forgiveness of his conniving brothers by Joseph, the Book of Genesis ends.

Genesis 22 to 24: death, marriage and sacrifice

Chapter 22, in which Isaac nearly gets sacrificed. Given this rather unpleasant and bloody scene (at least for the Ram, and probably fairly traumatic for the kid too), it seems somewhat appropriate that at least some Jewish and Muslim traditions place the situation of the near-sacrifice as the top of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem and therefore one of the sites within the much-disputed Temple Mount. It seems a fitting start for this extraordinarily beautiful and disturbed city.
Other scholars put the site of the sacrifice at Moreh, near Nablus (Biblical Shechem), another beautiful and bloody city where the Israeli army spends a fair amount of its time executing people and stifling the economy with checkpoints, when they're not committing mass butchery in Gaza.
A brief outline of the reasons behind the various theories can be found here.
Immediately following God's intervention in the sacrifice of Issac, Sarah dies. It's not made clear if the two incidents are related... but she is buried in Hebron, at what becomes the Tomb of the Patriarchs or the Cave of the Double Tombs. This is said to be the site of the burials of Adam and Eve (although some traditions put Adam in Jerusalem, under the site of Golgotha), Abraham alongside Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Leah. It is, like so mnay of the ancient sites in Palestine, Israel and surrounding countries, tremendouly sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, and has therefore of course been the object of innumerable battles for ownership, including capture by Saladin from the Crusaders and a massacre of 67 members of the local Jewish community in 1929. The current uneasy situation is that the building is divided into two, one section each for Jews and Muslims. All visitors, including the very, very occasional tourist, have to pass through a number of security gates and checks, staffed by Israeli military.



In February 1994 the Tomb was the site of a massacre by a right-wing Zionist settler from the (frankly rabid) community which has established itself in Hebron, where local Palestinians are regularly physically attacked and have rubbish and toilet water poured onto them and their market by settlers who have occupied the upper floors of their buildings. Baruch Goldstein, an off-duty Israeli army reservist from Brooklyn, entered the mosque side of the Tomb during Friday prayers and shot dead between 29 (from Israeli accounts) and 52 Palestinians, wounding 150 more. He is now venerated by some right-wing Israeli settler groups and political parties as a hero.
In chapter 25 Abraham orders Isaac to find a wife from outside the land of Canaan; this is ringing major bells from the compulsory course on kinship I had to do as part of my social anthropology degree. This is exogamy, marriage outside the group, a practice which is attributed to many needs from the genetic (bringing new genes to maintain diversity and prevent hereditary diseases) to the political (marrying into new families, dynasties etc to form alliances which might be useful in power struggles, times of economic need and so on. Early Twentieth century anthropologists used to spend entire careers drawing complicated diagrams and classifying entire societies according to who they allowed to marry whom.



In pleasant contrast to much of Genesis so far, the resulting bride, Rebekah, is selected on the basis of her kindness and generosity, qualities notably lacking in some of the family she's marrying into. Although maybe it's only the ladies who are supposed to be nice to people. In any case, much of Chapter 25 (perhaps verses 8-32 and 43-46), though repetitive, has a serenely poetic quality, talking about the camels which the messenger of Abraham brings with him and the water which Rebekah fetches for them - a reminder of the complete necessity of water to the desert and arid-country societies amongst which the Bible is set.
Interestingly, given the alarm which Muslim veiling seems to inspire in the modern age, Rebekah's response to seeing the man she is going to marry is:

"she took a vail, and covered herself."

There is something calm and dignified in Rebekah's choice and her stately generosity that is a welcome antidote to the bloodshed and bitterness of the Flood, Cain and Abel, Lot and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the Tower of Babel, and Abraham and Sarah's exploitation of Hagar.