What Does Genesis 48:17 Mean?

When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, it displeased him, and he took his father's hand to move it from Ephraim's head to Manasseh's head. Joseph objects to the crossed-hands positioning. His father's right hand is on Ephraim (the younger); Joseph attempts to move it to Manasseh (the firstborn, who should have the right hand). The displeasure is not anger but the concern of a son who believes his father has made an error: the dim-eyed old man has placed his hands wrong. Joseph's intervention is protective (correcting what he thinks is a mistake) rather than self-interested (Manasseh and Ephraim are both his sons).

The physical act of trying to move the patriarch's hand is Joseph's son-impulse overriding his official-persona. The prime minister of Egypt takes his dying father's hand to redirect it. The intimacy of the act: son touching father's hand in his final blessing: is one of the chapter's tenderfamily moments embedded in the theological drama. Joseph knows the conventions; he knows the right hand blesses supremely; he wants Manasseh, the firstborn, to receive what is properly his.

The intervention is also Joseph's reflex of fairness: he does not want Manasseh cheated of what the convention of firstborn status entitles him to. Joseph himself knows what it means to be the favored son: he lived the particular pain of differential love from his father. He may be trying to prevent a favoritism injustice, giving each son what his birth order entitles him to. The intervention is well-intentioned; it misunderstands that Jacob's crossing was deliberate, not accidental.