'And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, Few and evil have the
days of the years of my life been.'--GENESIS xlvii. 9.
'The God which fed me all my life long unto this day;
the Angel which redeemed me from all evil.'
--GENESIS xlviii. 15,16.
These are two strangely different estimates of the same life to be
taken by the same man. In the latter Jacob categorically contradicts
everything that he had said in the former. 'Few and evil,' he said
before Pharaoh. 'All my life long,' 'the Angel which redeemed me from
all evil,' he said on his death-bed.
If he meant what he said when he spoke to Pharaoh, and characterised
his life thus, he was wrong. He was possibly in a melancholy mood. Very
naturally, the unfamiliar splendours of a court dazzled and bewildered
the old man, accustomed to a quiet shepherd life down at Hebron. He had
not come to see Pharaoh, he only cared to meet Joseph; and, as was
quite natural, the new and uncongenial surroundings depressed him.
Possibly the words are only a piece of the etiquette of an Eastern
court, where it is the correct thing for the subject to depreciate
himself in all respects as far inferior to the prince. And there may be
little more than conventional humility in the words of my first text.
But I am rather disposed to think that they express the true feeling of
the moment, in a mood that passed and was followed by a more wholesome
one.
I put the two sayings side by side just for the sake of gathering up
one or two plain lessons from them.