Genesis 46:5: The last time anyone in this family leaves Canaan alive

"Then Jacob set out from Beersheba. The sons of Israel carried Jacob their father, their little ones, and their wives, in the wagons that Pharaoh had sent to carry him." The road the night before drew as a promise is now a road with a household on it. Verse one halted at the altar; this verse sets out, and the difference between the two is a sentence spoken in the dark. What the text keeps looking at is the wagons. They are mentioned when Joseph sends them, again when Jacob sees them and believes at last, again in the instruction to take them, and now a fourth time as the thing he is actually lying in. They are Egyptian carts on a Canaanite track — the physical proof that somebody down there has authority — and an old man too frail to walk two hundred and fifty miles is being carried south in them by the sons who once told him a goat's blood was his son's. He is a hundred and thirty years old, and Genesis is careful that you know how many go with him: sixty-six direct descendants on the road, seventy in the house once Joseph and his two sons are counted. It is a family, not a nation. Four hundred and thirty years later a nation walks back the other way. This is the last time a member of this family leaves Canaan on their own feet and by their own choice. Abraham went down and came back. Isaac was refused permission. Jacob goes down, is told he will be brought up again, and is — in a coffin, at the head of a state funeral, four chapters from here. The map draws the same line as the page before it, now in the colour of a journey made, on a wider frame so that the two do not sit on one. Beersheba behind, the delta ahead, and a household in wagons between them.