Exodus 1:1-6

DESCENDANTS OF ISRAEL, Exodus 1:1-6.

1-5. These are the names The heads of the tribes are recounted, and the statement of Genesis 46:27 is repeated, that seventy souls went down into Egypt; the writer, from the covenant associations of the number, loving to consider Israel as a seventy-fold people, though at the same time himself furnishing data by which we see that he did not intend to give an exact census. See notes on Luke 10:1-16, and Acts 1:15.

All… that came out of the loins of Jacob The idiom which represents Jacob himself as one of the “souls that came out of the loins of Jacob” gave the original readers no difficulty, and we are not to expect Occidental rhetoric in Oriental documents . See notes on Genesis 46:0.