Joseph always had dreams of having power over others. He dreamed of his sheaf of grain standing upright in the field while the sheaves of his brothers came to bow down to it. And then, to make matters worse, he dreamed that eleven stars, as well as the sun and the moon, bowed down to him. No longer was it just his brothers acknowledging his superiority, so were his father and step-mother. That was imagery perilously close to dishonour of parents.
In the last session, we saw that Joseph dispossessed the Egyptians, giving them no way to retrieve their inheritance. There was no Sabbath year for release from slavery, no Jubilee for return of ancestral land. In fact, the most fertile land, that of Goshen in the Nile Delta, was eventually handed over to his family.
The legacy of dispossession taints his children too. Ephraim, his second-son, returns to Canaan—but Ephraim’s sons decide on some cattle-rustling. They steal some livestock from Gath and, in a reprisal raid, almost the entire family is wiped out.
Two further children are born to Ephraim after this tragedy—one of them a remarkable woman, Sheerah. What we know about Sheerah could be written on a postage stamp:
His daughter was Sheerah, who built Lower and Upper Beth Horon as well as Uzzen Sheerah.
1 Chronicles 7:24 NIV
That’s it. All of it. But let’s not underrate her. Because she was a carrier of Joseph’s mantle and she began the overturning of the dispossession that taints it. Sheerah was the very first descendant of Abraham to act on the promise that God had given her forefather and actually take up possession in the land by building a city. Constructed in two parts, encoding covenant in its townplan, her city of Beth Horon became remarkable in the history of Israel: every time a battle was fought on the slope between its upper and lower section, the people of Israel had a resounding victory.
It was here, on the Ascent of Beth Horon, several centuries later, that Sheerah’s kinsman Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to be still so that he would have time to complete the battle against five Amorite armies. Together, even though they lived hundreds of years apart, Joshua and Sheerah created the circumstances through which a long-promised inheritance could be taken up.
They foreshadow a pattern that becomes increasingly evident over the millennia: partnerships between a man and a woman that result in the uptake or the return of an inheritance—Joshua and Sheerah, Othniel and Achsah, Barak and Deborah, Jesus and His mother at Cana, Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If you know these stories, you’ll know that it’s the women who, almost always, are the initiators.
Furthermore, note that even Jesus didn’t go it alone when it came to overturning dispossession: He twice involved a woman. Just so we can be completely sure that the first time wasn’t a coincidence.
This is Grace Drops. May Jesus bring you into the right partnership for your uptake of inheritance.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
For more on Joseph’s mantle, see The Summoning of Time: John 2 and 20: Mystery, Majesty and Mathematics in John’s Gospel #2.
For more on Sheerah, see As Exceptional as Sapphires: The Mother’s Blessing & God’s Favour Towards Women III.
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