What Does Genesis 46:27 Mean?
And the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt, were two living souls. All the living souls of the house of Jacob, who came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the sons of Joseph, which were born him in Egypt, were two souls: all the souls of the house of Jacob, which came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.THE KEY
The household’s seventy is counted in nefesh, living souls, so the number is made of whole lives.
THE MEANING
You are a living soul within the people you belong to, not an abstract unit. The verse holds Joseph’s two sons within the seventy, showing how a household’s total is made of individual lives.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the lie that belonging to a larger whole makes your life interchangeable.
THE ROOT
נֶפֶשׁ
nefesh
GROWS FROM
נ־פ־שׁ
n-p-sh
The verbal root means to refresh oneself; the noun names a living person or being.
“living souls” in this verse is nefesh. Here nefesh is countable because it names a living person: two sons, then seventy lives in one household. Its verbal branch naphash means “to refresh oneself,” linking the name of a person to life renewed.
ALSO GROWS
nefesh: A living soul, person, or being.
נֶפֶשׁ
The verse counts each member of the household as a whole living person.
naphash: To refresh oneself; to recover.
נָפַשׁ
This verbal form keeps the root’s sense near life renewed.
nefashot: Living souls or persons; the plural form of nefesh.
נְפָשׁוֹת
The plural form makes clear how the household’s number gathers many individual lives.
THE PATTERN
Scripture counts a people through living persons, so a total names lives held together rather than an abstraction.
And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all the goods they had gathered, and the living souls they had made in Haran. And they went out to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came.Your fathers went down into Egypt with seventy living souls, and now the LORD your God has made you as the stars of the heavens for multitude.Then those who gladly took his word in were immersed, and that day about three thousand living souls were added to them.THE THREAD
Your fathers went down into Egypt with seventy living souls, and now the LORD your God has made you as the stars of the heavens for multitude.Deuteronomy names the same seventy as nefesh, the living persons counted here. Then it sets that small number beside a people made as numerous as the stars, letting the count open into growth.
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