After reading chapter 49:
*Jacob gathers his sons around to predict their futures, and the futures of their descendants. Reuben will not excel because he slept with his father's slave wife, Bilhah. Simeon and Levi, who killed all the men in Shechem, will be cursed and scattered in Israel. Judah will be a ruler, and is blessed. Zebulon will live by the sea. Issachar will be forced to labor. Dan will provide justice for the tribes of Israel. Gad will be attacked. Asher will be a gourmet. Naphtali will have beautiful offspring. Joseph is given many blessings and called the prince among his brothers. Benjamin is described as a ravenous wolf.
*Here is the first time we encounter symbolic references to the lion of Judah and God as a shepherd and a rock.
*For people, like me, who do not belive in being able to see the future, passages like this are assumed to have been written with hindsight, with knowledge of certain events having already happened. Therefore, it had to have been written some time after the first king of Israel in the lineage of Judah, David. That would be a good 700 years or so after these events.
*Jacob asks his sons to have him buried in the same place as Abrahaham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, and Leah, in the cave on land bought from the Hittites. Then he dies.
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