The God Who Shepherded Me — Jacob Blesses Joseph’s Sons
Jacob is astonished that he not only sees Joseph again but also Joseph’s sons. As he blesses them, he deliberately crosses his hands and invokes the God before whom Abraham and Isaac walked, “the God which fed me all my life long unto this day.” The Hebrew verb carries the sense of shepherding, making Jacob’s testimony an early form of the biblical shepherd metaphor later developed powerfully in Psalm 23. He also invokes “the Angel which redeemed me from all evil.” Here “redeemed” describes God’s lifelong deliverance and preservation through danger; the passage does not explicitly identify the Angel as the preincarnate Christ or describe atonement for sin. Hebrews 11:21 explicitly remembers Jacob’s blessing of Joseph’s sons as an act of faith. The crossed hands signify the deliberate placement of blessing; Scripture never says their physical shape is a prophecy of the cross.