What Does Genesis 48:7 Mean?

"As for me, when I came from Paddan, to my sorrow Rachel died in the land of Canaan on the way, when there was still some distance to go to Ephrath, and I buried her there on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem)." Jacob's mention of Rachel's death in the middle of the adoption speech is the emotional context for the adoption. Rachel, Joseph's mother, died in childbirth with Benjamin: she is buried at Bethlehem (Genesis 35:19), not with the patriarchs in Machpelah. The adoption of Joseph's sons as Jacob's own is the dying patriarch's final act of honoring Rachel's legacy.

"To my sorrow Rachel died": the Hebrew (wattamot alay: she died on me, she died to my grief) is the personal possessive of grief: her death happened to me, at my expense, to my loss. Forty years after Rachel's death, Jacob's grief is still expressed with this language: she died "on me." The love that drove him to work fourteen years for her never fully resolved into acceptance of her death; it remained a present loss across the decades of Jacob's life in Canaan and Egypt.

The mention of Rachel's burial at Bethlehem is the contrast to the Machpelah burial that Jacob is requesting for himself (Genesis 47:30) and that Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah already have. Rachel's road burial: "there on the way to Ephrath": is the unresolved asymmetry: the patriarch of the covenant is in Machpelah; his beloved wife is buried separately by the road. Jacob's adoption of Rachel's grandsons (Ephraim and Manasseh, sons of Rachel's son Joseph) is implicitly connected to this grief: honoring the line of the wife he still mourns.