- 167-
(^37) A very considerable price for those times.
(^38) See "Those Holy Fields; Palestine illustrated by Pen and Pencil, p. 39.
(^39) The age of Isaac is thus ascertained: When Joseph stood before Pharaoh (Genesis
41:46), he was thirty years old, and hence thirty-nine when Jacob came into Egypt.
But at that time Jacob was one hundred and thirty years of age (Genesis 47:9). Hence,
Jacob must have been ninety-one years old when Joseph was born; and as this
happened in the fourteenth year of Jacob's stay with Laban, Jacob's flight from his
home must have taken place in the seventy-seventh year of his own, and the one
hundred and thirty-seventh of his father Isaac's life.
(^40) There is no mention here that Esau dreaded God's displeasure, or even thought of
it. We may remember our earthly, and yet, alas, forget our heavenly Father.
(^41) We infer from the sacred text that Jacob made his first night's quarters at Bethel.
(^42) Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 217.
(^43) The journey from Beersheba to Haran is quite four hundred miles.
(^44) So both Luther and Calvin understood it.
(^45) This is the correct translation; or else after another reading: "With good luck!"
(^46) In Jacob's last blessing (Genesis 49) we find quite a different succession of his
sons; this time also with a view to the purposes of the narrative, rather than to
chronological order.
(^47) It is a very remarkable circumstance that the Hebrew word for divining is the same
as that for serpent. In heathen rites also the worship of the serpent was connected
with magic; and in all this we recognize how all false religion and sorcery is truly to
be traced up to the "old serpent," which is Satan.
(^48) Thus we understand Genesis 30:41, 42. The spring-produce is supposed to be
stronger than that of autumn.
(^49) See the description in Canon Tristram's Land of Israel, pp. 470-563.
(^50) So the words are rendered by one of the ablest German critics.
(^)