WORD STUDY – WORSHIP ON THE TOP OF THE STAFF

Genesis 47:31: “And he said swear unto me and he swore unto him, And Israel bowed himself upon the bed’s head.”

Hebrews 11:21: “By faith Jacob when he was dying blessed both the sons of Joseph and worshipped upon the top of his staff.

This is one passage that sure does not make much sense.  Yet, it is quoted by Paul in the New Testament as the hallmark of Jacob’s faith.

First we need to determine just how to render this passage.   Paul, in Hebrews, tells us Jacob worshipped on the top of his staff.   The passage he was quoting from says that “Jacob bowed himself upon the bed’s head.”

There is a little confusion in the word “bed.”  The word bed and staff both share the same consonants.  Up until the 6^th century there were no vowels in the Hebrew and the context decided whether you would use the English word bed or staff. The Masoretes added the vowel pointings making this mittah (bed) by placing a chireq under the Mem. Yet, Paul his Book of Hebrews used the Greek word rhabdos which is the word for staff and rhabdos is the same word that the Septuagint uses. Thus the Masoretes should have placed a Qumaets rather than a chireq under the Mem giving us the Hebrew word mattah (staff). The context would suggest that the correct rendering would be mittah or bed as Jacob was bedridden at this time and close to death.  Yet, the Book of Hebrews is inspired of God and Paul’s use of rhabdos.  The Masoretes were Jewish and had no consideration for the New Testament or the Book of Hebrews so they went with what they felt was the contextual or traditional use of the word and rendered this as mittah (bed).   Practically all our modern translations follow in lock step with the Masoretic text and render this as bed except the NIV which renders it as a staff. This shows that the translators for the NIV had a greater dependence upon the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text.

As far as I am concerned, if no less authority than the Apostle Paul renders this as a staff then staff it is. The next word is bowed which Paul renders as worship. The Hebrew word is schacah. Which is the word used for worship. This is in a Piel form so Jacob entered into an intimate worship on the top of his staff.   Maybe we are better off saying he “intimately worshipped” on the bed’s head.   The problem here is the word rosh which means top or head. Oriental beds were mats and had no head.

So that leaves us with the question as to why Jacob intimately worshipped God on the top of His staff. The staff was most likely not just a walking stick, it was (as in similar practices today) the symbol of patriarchal authority and the patriarch would make oaths and solemn injunctions upon it. The problem is that it was Joseph who was supposed to give the oath and see to it that Jacob’s body was buried with his fathers in the promise land as seen in the previous verse.   In this verse Jacob enters into an intimate worship with God leaning on the symbol of his patriarchal authority.  Now we have to wonder why Paul highlights this as one of the hallmarks of faith.

Looking at the context of this verse it becomes very clear what the great faith of Jacob was.  This family almost died in the land of Canaan, the promised land.  They were forced to leave the land God had given them to live in Egypt where they could survive the famine.  They left the land filled with famine and death, to a land where they were honored and became prosperous because of Joseph.  Everyone was ready to make Egypt their home.  After all Joseph himself married an Egyptian and his sons were part Egyptian, why not just settle down and become Egyptians?  Everyone may have felt this way except for Jacob.  When Jacob forced his son Joseph to take an oath that he would return his father‘s bones to Canaan and he blessed his two part Egyptian half breed grandsons, Jacob was saying: “You are not Egyptians you are Hebrews who worship the Hebrew God. Don’t let this comfortable world in Egypt blind you to your purpose to remain a separate people.  When Jacob leaned on his patriarchal staff and intimately worshipped God, he was confirming the Hebrew identity of his children and he had condemned their descendants to a future life of slavery by keeping their identity.

This world is not our home, it is just our Egypt. There is another home that God has promised us. Jacob’s great act of faith was that he knew that no matter how good Egypt was at that time, their future, their hopes and dreams did not lie in Egypt, but in the land God promised to them. No matter how much we want to cling to this world and all that it has to offer, we need to lean on our staff and enter intimate worship with God and confirm with Him that our future, hopes and dreams do not lie with this world, but in the world to come, our true home where our true identity lies.