Jacob has a dream where God tells him to take all of his family to go meet Joseph in Egypt, where a great nation will be made for them.
Jacob complies and gathers his vast family (70 in all, and the Bible lists the name of each and every one of them), and they head to Egypt. When they arrive, there is a joyous reunion between Joseph and Jacob. Joseph tells his family that he will try to get the Pharaoh to allow them to settle in the land of Goshen.
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I have to remind myself that the Bible isn't just a book of stories. It's a catalog, a reference book, a written record of things which were important to ancient Hebrews.
That's why sometimes it's about as interesting to read as a phone book. Here in Genesis 46, we get another long genealogical list of names. I suppose if you were the one writing Genesis, you'd probably want to write everything down, including all the names of people in important families. But for us modern readers, it is hard to see the possible value in knowing that Eri was a son of Gad. Or the exact names of Baeriah's two sons (Heber and Malchiel). As I'm writing this though, I do find it interesting (although not in the way the Bible intended, I'm guessing) that this chapter only bothers to list the names of Jacob's male descendants.
Also in this chapter is another weird factoid about the ancient world. Here, Joseph tells us that "all shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians." Why?
This was the best answer I could find, courtesy of the blog of Marlin and Sally Vis:
The herdsman’s herd was a threat to a plowman’s field of barley or wheat. Because there was no room for the herdsman’s herd in the cultivated areas of Egypt, the occupation of shepherd became something abhorrent to the Egyptians. So the keepers of cattle had to be separated from the keepers of the crop.Basically, a shepherd's herd could potentially ruin land where crops were being grown. The Egyptians, unlike the Canaanites, didn't trust shepherds to be responsible enough to protect cultivated lands. Goshen was a land north of Egypts cultivated fields, sufficiently separated from them, and so that is where Joseph relocated his family, most of whom were shepherds.
