Jacob commissions Judah to lead the family to their
rendezvous with Joseph in Goshen. This is fitting, since Judah’s speech
(44.18-34) had induced Joseph’s self-revelation. In addition, Judah’s role here
produces a balance where the son was suggested Joseph’s enslavement (37.27),
and thereby separated father from son, should be the one who leads the way to
their reunion. On the other hand, the choice of Judah is surprising, because
the entire ancestral family has just been listed, in which Judah was only fourth
in the order of priority. So the way in which Judah has gained ascendancy among
the brothers, despite the Tamar incident, shows that it is not only Joseph’s
lordship over his brothers that challenges the usual conventions of
primogeniture (see 49.1-28).
The situation is set up for the fulfilment of that
element of Joseph’s dream which predicted Jacob bowing before Joseph (37.9-11).
Joseph is the eleventh of 12 sons, yet has become ‘lord of the land’ (42.30),
and ‘like Pharaoh himself’ (44.18), to whom Egyptians and brothers alike bow
the knee (41.43; 42.6; 43.26). Yet Jacob does now bow the knee. Joseph
‘presented himself; (46.29) to Jacob, who retains all the prestige of family
patriarch. Jacob has been involved in two reunion scenes, the first with his brother,
the second with his son, both of which refuse to fulfil narrative predictions.
Rebekah’s divine oracle had predicted that Esau would serve Jacob (25.23), and
Isaac’s blessing that Esau would serve him and bow (ḥwh) before him
(27.20, 40). Yet when the two meet again, it is Jacob who comes bowing and
scraping the two meet again, it is Jacob who comes bowing and scraping before
Esau, seven times no less (33.3). Jacob had interpreted the dream of 37.9-10 to
predict that he would bow (ḥwh) before Joseph. But he never does. Thus,
in reunion scenes, Jacob’s actions invert the expectations set up at the
beginning of the narratives (45.1-15). One can make a good case for saying that
the failure of the expectations is caused by characters’ insistence on forcing
their fulfilment . . . (Laurence A. Turner, Genesis [2d ed.; Readings: A
New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009], 201)