What Does Genesis 48:15 Mean?

And he blessed Joseph and said, "The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day." The blessing address is to Joseph rather than directly to the boys: the covenant mediated through the father. Jacob blesses Joseph, in whom the heritage of the covenant flows to the sons being adopted. The blessing text opens with the patriarchal covenant name of God: the God before whom Abraham and Isaac walked: the ancestral God of three generations of covenant promise.

"The God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day": the shepherd metaphor for God, applied by a patriarch who is himself a shepherd, is one of the most intimate characterizations of God in Genesis. Jacob who has tended Sheep his whole life (most visibly in Laban's service) now speaks of God as the one who has tended him with the same dedicated care a shepherd gives the flock. The pastoral metaphor will resonate across the rest of scripture: Psalm 23's "the LORD is my shepherd" extends exactly the language Jacob uses here at the end of a life of literal and figurative shepherding.

"All my life long to this day": the scope of the shepherd-care is comprehensive: from birth to this dying moment, God has been the shepherd. The man who said "few and evil have been the days of the years of my life" (Genesis 47:9) nonetheless recognizes in those same years the consistent shepherding of God. The "few and evil" and the "shepherd all my life long" are both true together: the years were hard AND God shepherded through every one of them. Jacob's final blessing articulates a theology of divine care through difficult lives rather than divine protection from difficult lives.