Genesis 49:1

1. Assemble yourselves These words evidently belong to the poem itself, and are not the composition of the historian, who inserted a copy of Jacob’s prophecy in this place in his volume . The gathering contemplated was around the patriarch’s couch, whither Joseph had before hastened when he heard of his father’s sickness, (Genesis 48:2,) and where the whole family were now summoned to hear the prophetic word . What particular meaning the writer attached to the expression the end of the days is somewhat doubtful . It is too definite a phrase to denote merely after times, or the future . It suggests the idea of a limit, the end of an age, aeon, or period . Such an age had its ראשׁית and its אחרית , its beginning and its end, and the author of this prophecy proposed to speak of events belonging to the end, or closing period, of the age to which he belonged. The Septuagint translates it by the phrase so common in the New Testament, επ ’ εσχατων των ημερων , in the last days, which suggests the same idea of the closing period of an aeon. The events contemplated as befalling the sons of Jacob in the end of the days were such as belonged to the last period of the prophet’s vision; the end as distinguished from the beginning of Israelitish history. How near or how remote that end might be is left entirely undetermined.