early life was skilled in dreams, succeeded by interpreting the visions of Pharaoh in obtaining a sort of premiership in Egypt; while filling which office he, like more modern Prime Ministers, “placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land.” Joseph not only gave his own family the best place in the land, but he also, by a trick of statecraft, obtained the land for the king, made slaves of the people, and made it a law over the land of Egypt that the king should be entitled to one-fifth of the produce, always, of course, excepting and saving the rights of the priest. Judah, another brother, sought to have burned a woman by whom he had a child. A third, named Reuben, was guilty of the grossest vice, equalled only by that of Absalom the son of David; of Simeon and Levi, two more of Jacob’s sons, it is said that “instruments of cruelty were in their habitations;” their conduct, as detailed in the 34th chapter of Genesis, alike shocks by its treachery and its mercilessness. After Jacob had heard that his son Joseph was governor in Egypt, but before he had journeyed farther than Beersheba, God spake unto him in the visions of the night, and probably forgetting that he had given him a new name, or being more accustomed to the old one, said, “Jacob, Jacob,” and then told him to go down into Egypt; where Jacob died after a residence of about seventeen years, when 147 years of age.³² Before Jacob died he blessed first the sons of Joseph, and then his own children, and at the termination of his blessing to Ephraim and Manasseh, we find the following speech addressed to Joseph, “Moreover I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow.” This speech implies warlike pursuits on the part of Jacob, of which the Bible gives no record, and which seem incompatible with his recorded life. The sword of craft and the bow of cunning are the only weapons in the use of which he was skilled. When his sons murdered and robbed the Hivites, fear seems to have been Jacob’s most prominent characteristic. ³² Bava Bathra, fol. 17, col. 1, says: “Over six the angel of death had no dominion and these were: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam,” and it also says that these and Benjamin, the son of Jacob, “are seven who are not consumed by the worm in the grave.”