And Jacob their father said to them, “You have bereaved me of my children: Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against me.”
Jacob hears his sons' report and sees the returned silver in their sacks. One son is gone, one is held in Egypt, and now a demand hangs over the youngest. He reads it all as a verdict against him. His words are the honest cry of a grieving man. They are also a misreading of what God was doing.
The words "is not"
Jacob says the same words about Joseph and about Simeon. The phrase is not about whether they exist. Scripture uses it in a fixed sense, and one writer traces that back to Enoch. (The ESV reads "is no more" and "All this has come against me"; older translations, which the writers quote, read "is not" and "All these things are against me.")
C E StuartWhen God took Enoch from the earth, "he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). He was no longer on earth, but in the other world. Again, Jacob was asked to let Benjamin go down into Egypt. He cried out, "You have bereaved me of my children: Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and you will take Benjamin away" (Genesis 42:36). So the phrase was not has in Scripture a definite meaning… It says nothing about whether the person exists. It is a technical term about personal presence on earth.
The charge he lays on his sons
Jacob says his sons have robbed him of his children. Years earlier he had accepted a different story about Joseph. The change in his words went to work on his sons' guilty consciences.
J. G. BellettJacob seems now for the first time to come to a suspicion that they had been guilty concerning Joseph. He had before said, "A fierce animal has devoured him," but now it is "You have bereaved me of my children." … All this must have stirred the arrow afresh in their hearts, so that it might still be doing its needed work there.
Counting the losses
Jacob totals up three sons and calls the sum a loss. Read from the other end, the same three items are the stages of his rescue.
Hamilton SmithJacob is not guilty, like his sons, but his feeble faith can see no trace of God's hand in all these circumstances… To sight and nature these things were against him. But they were the very means God was using to bless him. "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and you will take Benjamin away." These are the things that were for him. Joseph lost to his father, rejected and sold, imprisoned and then raised high; Simeon held in prison; Benjamin taken from his father — these were all stages on the path to blessing… Had Jacob been able to persist in his thoughts he would have thwarted God in His ways of blessing, for Jacob says, "My son shall not go down."
What lay on the other side
The old man expected to lose Benjamin as he had lost Joseph. What lay just ahead was the opposite of everything he feared.
A J PollockHe never thought that the shadow of dreaded loss lying on his spirit was really the clouds beginning to break. Instead of losing Benjamin he was about to get Joseph back. And with Joseph back, every pinch of hunger would be over. He would live in the land Joseph supplied and receive from his plenty, even while the rest of the earth was starving. Ask Jacob, "Does God care?" Hear his answer, spoken to Joseph: "I never expected to see your face, and behold, God has let me see your offspring also" (Genesis 48:11).
Not the language of faith
One writer weighs Jacob's verdict against faith. Take away the losses, he says, and the blessing goes with them.
G. V. Wigram"All these things are against me" was not the language of faith; for without all those very things the Lord could not have made good His way of blessing.
Years later Jacob described his life in the opposite way. One writer sets his complaint here beside the promise that God works everything together for good.
F. B. HoleHe had yet to learn that all these things were part of God's plan for his ultimate good. That is why, at the end of his life, he could speak of "the angel who has redeemed me from all evil" (Genesis 48:16). The fact was that "all these things" were going to "work together for good," and so give us an effective illustration of the truth of Romans 8:28.
Summary
- Missing, not dead. "Is no more" (older versions: "is not") means absent from the scene, not gone from existence. Joseph, the son Jacob counted as lost, was alive and providing.
- Absent, and at work. Joseph gone, Simeon held, Benjamin demanded: Jacob mourned all three. Each was a stage God used to bring the whole family into blessing.
- A cry that convicts. "You have bereaved me of my children" was truer than Jacob knew. The charge kept working on the consciences of the sons who had sold Joseph.
- Sight counts losses; faith counts God. "All this has come against me" is not the language of faith. Without those very things the blessing could not have come.
- The end tells the truth. The man who could see nothing ahead but loss ended his life speaking of the angel who redeemed him from all evil.