Genesis 47: "Through you all nations will be blessed" - nation #1?
All the way back in Genesis 12, God promises Abraham all peoples on earth will be blessed by you (12:3). Fast forward to Genesis 28 and the promise is reiterated to Jacob: All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring (28:14). We know that this promise is ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Jesus, but this doesn't mean that God does not start to fulfil that promise in more immediate terms (it seems to be the way God's promises work!), and so here we see the blessing of another nation.
And OK, so Egypt probably wasn't the first nation to be blessed by God's people (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had many interactions with other nations before this and benefit may have come from this), but it is the first major one where we start to see the promises of God truly unfold. On a practical level, the nation of Egypt is saved by Joseph's presence in the country and the sovereignty of God working through him. He has already interpreted Pharaoh's dream, thus warning the country of the impending disaster, and now is showing wisdom and forethought in order to preserve the people.
(To our eyes, Joseph's strategy seems exploitative, but this was not the view of the world in which he lived. 47:25 gives credence to this: "You have saved our lives...may we find favour in the eyes of our lord' we will be in bondage to Pharaoh." As suggested by multiple commentators, the security of 'bondage' to a good master was a source of security and sometimes even preferable to 'freedom' (i.e. 'self employment') - at its best it meant a job for life with a benevolent employer (of course this was not always the case). Joseph buying the land on behalf of Pharaoh meant that he was able to give the people seed to plant so that the land did not become permanently desolate).
Side note about economics aside, there is a relational and ceremonial blessing. It is one of those surprises that is lost to us, being unacquainted with the customs of the time, that Jacob, the foreigner, blesses Pharaoh, the all-powerful king. It would have been far more normal for Jacob to bow before the King, and the superior blesses the inferior.
We get even more of hint of the 'topsy turvey' when we consider that Jacob is frail (it is said that the literal meaning of 'Joseph brought his father Jacob in and presented him before Pharaoh' is that Jacob needed to be carried in, and other verses in the surround chapters also hint at his frailty). Granted, Jacob's age is one to be respected in the culture of the time, but he himself describes his years as few and difficult (47:9), alluding to the great sorrows and possibly feeling a lack of 'success' compared to his father and grandfather.
But Pharaoh recognised from where the blessing came, and accepted the declaration of that blessing. God's representatives are not the strong or powerful - either politically or physically - but those who mourn, who are weak, and who are strangers in a foreign land.
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