What Does Genesis 47:10 Mean?

And Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out from the presence of Pharaoh. The exit blessing mirrors the entry blessing of verse 7: Jacob arrived before Pharaoh blessing him and departs blessing him. The double blessing brackets his entire audience with Pharaoh. The patriarch enters the throne room with a blessing and leaves with a blessing: the covenant patriarch's characteristic mode of engagement with the world around him is the extension of God's favor through the patriarchal blessing function.

The brevity of "Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out": after the extended response about the quality of his years: is the narrative's swift closure of the court audience. Jacob has said what he needed to say; the blessing is given again; the audience is over. The patriarch who described his years as "few and evil" exits the king's presence having blessed him twice. The man with the difficult life carries and dispenses the covenant blessing: the two realities coexist without contradiction. Jacob's hard life and Jacob's blessing function are not in tension in the narrative; they are both simply true about the same person.

The end of the Pharaoh audience marks the transition from the relocation narrative (Chapters 42 to 47a) to the establishment narrative (Genesis 47:11 to 31) and eventually to Jacob's final blessings and death (Chapters 48 to 50). Jacob entered Egypt as the grieving patriarch recovering his lost son; he stands in Pharaoh's court as the covenant bearer extending divine blessing; he will settle in Goshen as the family patriarch whose last seventeen years are spent in the country of the son he thought was dead. The court audience is the formal ratification of the family's Egyptian settlement, and Jacob's blessing of Pharaoh is the covenant patriarch's contribution to the occasion.