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 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. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from before Pharaoh. Genesis 47.9-10
Days seem like years for the old patriarch, and years like days. The longest life span is never enough and never adequate. Many years earlier God gave Jacob the name ‘Israel’ after a mysterious encounter with a being who wrestled with him until daybreak (Genesis 32: 24). Yet despite this divine confidence in him, Jacob knows that he did not achieve all he set out to do. It is tempting to remain in thrall to the past, to replicate the actions of our forebears, to expect the same of our inheritors. Jacob’s humility reminds us that we must accept what we inherit, act in the present, and go forward. Robert Browning puts Jacob’s wisdom to ironic use in ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ (1845). The corrupt prelate plays his illegitimate sons off against each other as they gather around his deathbed hoping to inherit the old man’s wealth. ‘Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage’, he remarks, before threatening to bequeath his villas to the Pope (line 101).
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