What Does Genesis 45:11 Mean?

"There I will provide for you, for there are yet five years of famine to come, so that you and your household, and all that you have, do not come to poverty." The practical promise: Joseph will provide for the family in Goshen through the five remaining famine years. "I will provide": the word (Hebrew: kilkel: to sustain, to nourish) is the administrative vocabulary of food provision. Joseph, who has been providing for all of Egypt and all who came to Egypt, will specifically provide for his father's household in Goshen. The general administrative mission and the particular family care converge: the prime minister who provides for all will provide for his own.

"Five years of famine to come": the timeline again. The urgency of the relocation comes from this number: five years of no plowing, no harvest, no agricultural productivity in Canaan. The family cannot sustain itself in Canaan for five more years without the continued episodic grain-purchasing from Egypt. Residing in Goshen under Joseph's administrative provision is the solution that the famine's timeline makes practical rather than merely emotionally appealing. Jacob should come not just because Joseph wants him near but because the survival of the whole household requires the arrangement Joseph is proposing.

"Do not come to poverty" (Hebrew: tirash: to become impoverished, to be dispossessed). The word implies the loss of material goods through destitution: the process by which famine strips a household of its resources as it exhausts its stores to buy food. Without the arrangement Joseph is proposing, the family's flocks, herds, goods, and ultimately people would be sold off or depleted in purchasing grain for five more years. By bringing the family to Goshen where Joseph will provide, the patriarch's household is preserved intact through the famine: the material preservation that accompanies the physical preservation.