A REMNANT — what is LEFT OVER, from a root meaning to remain. Joseph uses it of a family of seventy people: 'God sent me before you to set for you a SHE'ERIT in the land' (45:7). The scale is domestic and the vocabulary is national — this is the word the prophets will spend centuries using for the surviving fragment of Israel after catastrophe (Isaiah 10:20-22; Jeremiah 23:3; Micah 2:12). Genesis plants it here, in a private room, describing a rescue nobody outside that room knows happened. KJV 'to preserve you a posterity in the earth'; ASV and ESV keep 'remnant.' → first discussed at Gen 45:7