Jacob's Family Moves to Egypt

During severe famine, Jacob's sons travel to Egypt for grain and are reunited with Joseph. Joseph invites the entire family — 70 persons — to settle in the land of Goshen in Egypt.

Begins Israel's 430-year sojourn in Egypt, setting the stage for the Exodus. God preserves the covenant family through famine.

Key Verses

Background

The seven years of famine predicted by Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams struck with devastating force across the ancient Near East. In Canaan, Jacob's family faced starvation. Jacob sent ten of his sons to Egypt to purchase grain — the only land where stockpiles had been gathered. Through a series of dramatic encounters they did not yet understand, they were being drawn back to the brother they had sold into slavery more than twenty years earlier. After Joseph revealed himself to them and extended forgiveness, Pharaoh himself invited the entire family to relocate to Goshen, the fertile eastern region of the Nile delta: "The best of the whole land of Egypt is yours" (Genesis 45:18). God confirmed the move to Jacob in a vision at Beersheba.

The Event

At Beersheba, before crossing into Egypt, Jacob offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. God spoke to him in a vision at night: "I am God, the God of your father. Don't be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will certainly bring you back again" (Genesis 46:3–4). The divine reassurance addressed Jacob's deepest anxiety — that leaving the land of promise might mean abandoning the covenant. The family that descended numbered seventy persons from Jacob's own body (Genesis 46:26–27), a figure echoed in Exodus 1:5. Stephen's account in Acts 7:14 gives seventy-five, likely reflecting the Septuagint reckoning that included additional descendants. Jacob's family settled in Goshen and Joseph provided for them through the years of famine.

Theological Significance

The descent into Egypt marks the beginning of Israel's 430-year sojourn, which would climax in the Exodus — the defining redemptive event of the Old Testament. God had foretold this very sequence to Abraham: "Your offspring will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years" (Genesis 15:13). Every element of the Joseph narrative — the dreams, the slavery, the providential rise — had been building toward this moment of preservation. The number seventy carries symbolic weight as the totality of Jacob's seed; from these seventy would grow a nation as numerous as the stars. The family's move also fulfills the principle that God's purposes for His people are often accomplished through routes that appear to bypass the promised land, requiring trust that the covenant promise remains intact even in exile.