What Does Genesis 47:9 Mean?
And Jacob said to Pharaoh, The days of the years of my sojourning are a hundred and thirty years. Few and bad have the days of the years of my life been, and they have not reached the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their sojourning.
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 Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.THE KEY
Jacob calls his years a sojourning: life is passage through time, not ground he can hold permanently.
THE MEANING
Your years pass as a sojourning: life is lived in passage through time. Jacob sets his 130 years beside his fathers’ longer spans and calls his days few and harsh, leaving both finitude and hardship plainly named.
THE ROOT
מְגוּרַי
meguray
GROWS FROM
גור
gur
To sojourn or dwell as a stranger.
“sojourning” in this verse is meguray. Meguray means “my sojournings,” carrying the sense of dwelling as a stranger. Applied to his years, it makes a lifetime a passage through temporary dwellings.
ALSO GROWS
ger: Sojourner; resident alien.
גֵּר
It shows the root’s sense of living in a place without being native to it.
magur: Sojourning; dwelling.
מָגוּר
It names the condition of sojourning itself, close to Jacob’s word for his years.
רָעִים
ra’im
GROWS FROM
רעע
raʿaʿ
To be bad, cause harm, or afflict.
The word retains its force of evil or badness, with a range that includes what is harmful and distressing. Applied to days, it describes the hardship of a life.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad, evil, harmful.
רַע
This adjective names the adverse quality Jacob gives to his days.
rōaʿ: Badness; distress or misery.
רֹעַ
This noun shows how the root can describe hardship as an experienced condition.
יַעֲקֹב
Yaʿaqov
GROWS FROM
עקב
ʿaqav
Heel; to follow at the heel or supplant.
“Jacob” in this verse is Yaʿaqov. The name carries the image of grasping a heel and following close behind. Here the named speaker describes his own life as sojourning, placing that image beside a life understood as passage.
ALSO GROWS
ʿaqev: Heel.
עָקֵב
It is the bodily image associated with Jacob’s name.
ʿaqav: To follow at the heel; to supplant.
עָקַב
It gives the name an active sense of coming close behind or grasping after another.
THE PATTERN
Human life is a finite sojourn, measured in years whose hardships stand within a lineage larger than one lifetime.
The days of our years, in them, are seventy years, or with strength eighty years; yet their span is toil and emptiness, for it is sheared away swiftly, and we take wing.Hear and respond to my prayer, LORD. Tilt your ear to my cry, and do not be deaf to my tears. For I am a sojourner with you, one who settles, like all my fathers.In trust all these died, not having brought home the promises, but seeing them from far off, and embracing them, and saying together that they were strangers and those passing through on the earth.THE THREAD
Your statutes are the songs I pluck in the house of my sojourning.The word rendered “pilgrimage” in both verses comes from גור (gur), “to sojourn.” Psalm 119 calls the place of sojourning a house filled with songs, so the passing years can also be a place one inhabits.
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