Hello and welcome to the Scriptures Are Real podcast, the podcast where we talk about things that have made the scriptures become very real to us.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and today we're going to do a very brief shortcast about the blessings of the 12 tribes of Israel.

In the reading for this week, we see Jacob giving his son's blessings.

And this is, in some ways, the beginning of patriarchal blessings.

And that's part of what makes this very real to me is that we all receive these blessings

that talk to us about our lineage in the House of Israel

and the blessings that we part of the House of Israel.

It's such an important blessing that the church records this and keeps it on file.

If you lose it, you can ask them and they'll send it to you and so on.

It's a really important thing.

And a lot of people have

asked questions about what do these blessings to the tribes mean. So I thought I would just talk a

little bit about the blessings for each tribe, not a tremendous amount. I'm going to do it by

reading from my book, God Will Prevail, where I really looked into this. I have a part of a chapter

on this. And so I'm just going to

read parts of this book to you as we go through and talk about each tribe. So we get the

blessings that Jacob gives his sons. We find that in Genesis 48 and 49. But it's also worth

noting that in Deuteronomy 33, Moses will bless each of the tribes as one of the very last things he does before he leaves them and they go into the promised land.

And we want to compare those two and kind of put them together to understand how these blessings work.

So Rubin had been the birthright son, but because he had slept with his

father's wife or concubine, he lost that birthright ability. And really, his blessing was more of

a warning, words of warning and counsel to Rubin. So he's compared to water, which is both the source of life and has the power for

...