Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Yesterday we saw Jacob preparing for his death at the age of 147 by asking his son Joseph

to make sure he was buried in Canaan, not Egypt.

Today we pick up with Jacob blessing Joseph's sons Ephraim and Manasseh before he dies.

Jacob recounts God's promises to him to give him many offspring and to give them the land of Canaan.

And he refers to God by a name we've seen a few times, God Almighty.

This is translated from the Hebrew El Shaddai, which loosely means God of the mountains. One of the things we haven't talked

about much, but that's really important is that God's names represent his character. They tell

us who he is and what he does. Jacob continues his speech to Joseph, and in it,

he does a peculiar thing. He formally adopts Joseph's children as his own, possibly because he was

robbed of having Joseph in his life as a young boy, but he's gotten to spend many years with these

children. He compares Joseph's two

oldest children to his two oldest children, Rubin and Simeon. And while this feels a little weird to me

personally, it's actually probably a generous move, a way of establishing that these two boys

will receive an inheritance from him, along with Joseph's brothers.

They will be heirs to the land and the promise.

This will continue to come into play in our reading, so make a mental note of it.

Joseph brings the boys to him and positions Manasseh, the oldest, in front of Jacob's right hand,

because that is considered to be the hand of blessing and power.

And he positions

Ephraim, the youngest, in front of Jacob's left hand. But then Jacob crosses his hands,

putting his right hand on Ephraim's head. Jacob is going blind, just like his dad Isaac was

...