Genesis 46:26

Study note

Setting — The narrator records the count of Jacob’s direct descendants who traveled to Egypt, explicitly excluding the wives of his sons, as the household prepares to settle there during the famine.

The words — יֹצְאֵי יְרֵכֹו (yo’tzei yerekhô) literally means “those who came out of his thigh,” functioning as a Hebrew idiom for direct biological offspring, while כָּל (kol) establishes the scope as “all” or “every” person in that category.

The thread — This household tally runs parallel to Exodus 1:5, which records the same seventy-person total including Joseph, and fulfills the multiplication mandate given in Genesis 35:11.

Why it lands — The text demands a reader to track the precise genealogical accounting that grounds Israel’s national emergence, requiring attention to how the promised lineage is explicitly enumerated before entering a foreign land.

Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.