/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

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>>802138

I wonder about this too, anon. Thank you for the thread. For right now, it honestly is leading me to think that I possibly ought to be a LOT more careful with my words…but the tongue is a very hard thing to control … (like right now?). If it is the Lord’s will, it is my prayer that the OP of this thread will be made to experience a blessing from the Lord, and that when it occurs OP will be granted the grace of wisdom and sight , and to recognize the origin of the blessing, and that is was really and truly sent from the Christ within me for the benefit of the Christ within you. Bless the Lord, O my soul!

Words especially had significance in biblical life. Be it blessings or curses. And such things couldn't be "redone" either (like the case with Isaac accidentally blessing Jacob instead of Esau). But that probably doesn't answer your specific question. At the end of life, it's the equivalent of leaving a will and last words of advice.. to put it simply.

Oh, also in the case of Genesis, the last blessings were specifically about the tribes of Israel. This is prophecy that plays out in the rest of Jewish history.

Some modern translations ruin it, but Jacob's dying words to Judah are his prophecy about the Messiah coming from the tribe of Judah (along with the Davidic kings).

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be."

In other words, once the period of the kings (the sceptre) of Judah have disappeared, Shiloh - meaning "the peaceful one" - will come.. and all people will gather to him.

Some modern versions obscure this, and might translate it abstractly and not as a proper name or something else equally bad. But it was always understood as one of the earliest Messianic prophecies (it's 2000 years before Christ). This is one reason why people in Jesus' time were expecting a Messiah. The era of kings had disappeared and Messianic hope was in the air.

The blessing or curse of a righteous person communicates God's will for the people concerned. Even a pagan prophet like Balaam couldn't manage to curse Israel, but, moved by prophetic impulsion, he could only bless them.

But, blessings and curses do not come out of nowhere. I mean that they simply describe the end result of a series of events that is currently still happening. Blessings and curses do not exist in a vacuum. You have this most evidently at the end of Deuteronomy, where blessings await Israel if Israel follows the commandments, and curses await Israel if Israel violates the commandments.

A blessing is to say "because of what you are doing, something good will come to you from God at the end" - but it is said without necessarily knowing how what one is doing right now will lead to this good conclusion, or even without knowing who is the person being blessed.

Because in genesis most of the time it was the transfering of God's gift of the messiah being among their descendants to another person

>or is an actual transfer of divine force

It's this.