My visual image of the Jacob/Esau story had always been of two teenagers. However, Alfred Ederscheim points out that the chronology is much different. Jacob was 130 years old when he moved to Egypt. Joseph was 39 years old at the time (30 when he entered Pharoah's service plus the years of plenty and 2 years of famine). This means that Jacob was 91 when Joseph was born. Since he worked for Laban for 20 years, he was 71 when he fled from Esau after the deception of his father. It is clear from the birth order that Joseph and Dinah were approximately the same age. Dinah must have been sexually mature at the time of the Shechem incident, perhaps a minimum of 14. Benjamin's birth is associated with that, so Benjamin must have been a baby or toddler when Joseph, at age 17 was sold into Egypt.
Is there anything wrong with this logic? If this is right, then Jacob was very late in coming into a relationship with God. Throughout his life, God is spoken of as the God of his fathers Abraham and Isaac, not his God. It's only at the end of his life that he looks back and realizes that God was working behind the scenes in his life the whole time, though this was not abundantly obvious to his consciousness.
Is there anything wrong with this logic? If this is right, then Jacob was very late in coming into a relationship with God. Throughout his life, God is spoken of as the God of his fathers Abraham and Isaac, not his God. It's only at the end of his life that he looks back and realizes that God was working behind the scenes in his life the whole time, though this was not abundantly obvious to his consciousness.
