What Does Genesis 47:13 Mean?

Now there was no food in all the land, for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished by reason of the famine. The narrative's attention shifts from the family settlement to the broader famine context. Verse 13 returns to the universal scope of the food crisis: no food anywhere, Egypt and Canaan both "languishing" (Hebrew: tela': faint, exhausted, failing). The famine that sent Jacob's sons to Egypt, that brought the known world to Joseph's distribution points, is at its most severe in these middle years (year three and four of seven). The family's settlement in Goshen under Joseph's provision is their insulation from the crisis; the rest of Egypt and Canaan are still fully exposed to it.

The phrase "the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan" brings together the two geographies that dominate Genesis's closing chapters: the land of the famine-provision (Egypt) and the land of the promise (Canaan). Both are languishing; neither is spared. The family of the promise is settled in Egypt precisely because Canaan cannot sustain them during the famine. The geographic and theological complexity of this moment: the covenant family in Egypt, the promised land uninhabitable: is the seed of the extended Egyptian sojourn that the rest of Israel's historical memory will grapple with.

The narrative's return to the universal famine context after the family settlement section (vv.1 to 12) signals the transition to the account of Joseph's economic policies (vv.13 to 26). The famine that depleted Egypt's population of silver (v.14), livestock (v.16), and eventually their land and freedom (vv.19 to 21) is the context within which Joseph's administrative policies are enacted. The land policy is sometimes criticized as exploitative; it can also be read as the administrative response to a crisis in which the alternative to the policy may have been mass starvation.