Vayechi

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vayechi ('And he lived', Genesis 47:28-50:26) closes the book of Genesis with the aged Jacob blessing Joseph's sons and his own twelve sons in turn, his death and burial in Canaan, and the death of Joseph in Egypt. As the last portion of a book, its reading ends with the congregation's cry of chazak.

Jacob's blessings of Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, in which he deliberately crosses his hands to place his right hand on the younger Ephraim despite Joseph's attempt to correct him (Genesis 48:13-20), is read by rabbinic commentary as continuing the Torah's recurring pattern of younger sons receiving precedence, and the blessing's specific wording, that Jewish children be blessed 'like Ephraim and like Manasseh,' became the standard formula recited over sons in Jewish households on Shabbat evening to this day. Jacob's blessing, or in several cases rebuke, of his twelve sons in turn (Genesis 49) is read by commentators as simultaneously personal and tribal, addressing each son's own character while also anticipating the future territory and fortune of the tribe descended from him, with Judah's blessing (Genesis 49:8-12), promising that 'the sceptre shall not depart from Judah,' read in later Jewish tradition as messianic in scope.

Jacob's testamentary poem over his twelve sons (Genesis 49) is treated by many biblical scholars as one of the oldest surviving pieces of Hebrew poetry in the Torah, its archaic grammar and vocabulary, some of it obscure enough that ancient translators themselves struggled with individual lines, read as evidence that the poem existed independently and was incorporated into the surrounding prose narrative rather than composed together with it, a judgement source critics apply similarly to the Song of the Sea and the Song of Moses elsewhere in the Torah. Traditional commentary instead reads the poem as Jacob's own prophetic testament, delivered as a single continuous speech under direct inspiration in his final hours.

Genesis ends with Joseph's bones unburied and his family settled, prosperous but still resident, in a foreign land, a deliberately unresolved close that only the book of Exodus answers with slavery and deliverance; the shape of the Torah's opening two books is accordingly read by literary critics as one continuous composition in five parts rather than as five independent books loosely joined, since Vayechi's ending only makes narrative sense as the hinge into what follows.