Down to Egypt

God meets Jacob at the border with the promise given to all the fathers, do not be afraid, I am with you, I will bring you back. The reunion of father and son after twenty-two years of grief is one of the tenderest scenes in the book. But a long shadow lies across it. The family goes down to Egypt to survive a famine, and the descent that saves them is the very one that becomes, in the next book, four hundred years of slavery. The going-down that rescues is also the bondage that will have to be redeemed.