Ephraim

Ephraim is the younger son of Joseph and his Egyptian wife Asenath, with an older brother called Manasseh. Their grandfather Jacob considers them as important as his own sons, so at the end of his life, he specially blesses them.

The name Ephraim means “doubly fertile”. His father Joseph gives him this name because he is happy that he has fathered two sons in the land of Egypt.
Ephraim himself has five sons (1 Chronicles 7:20-27) and they form the clans in the tribe of Ephraim.

When his father Jacob is at the point of death, Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, to him (Genesis 48:1-20), setting Manasseh at Jacob’s right hand and Ephraim at his left. He expects that Jacob will give his older son a more important blessing than his younger son.
But Jacob wants to do precisely the opposite. So he gives his blessings with his hands crossed, foreseeing great power for Manasseh and even more power for Ephraim.

Although Joseph is a son of Jacob, he is not generally regarded as one of the patriarchs of Israel. Instead, in the Bible, often his sons Manasseh and Ephraim are represented as patriarchs, each with his own territory.
That is why in the Bible the name Ephraim sometimes refers to the tribe of Ephraim, whose ancestor is Ephraim, and at other times to the territory occupied by the descendants of Ephraim, an area in the centre of Israel, between the territories of Manasseh and Benjamin.

A son of Ephraim called Rephah is an ancestor of Joshua (1 Chronicles 7:27), and the parents of the prophet Samuel belonged to the tribe of Ephraim (1 Samuel 1:1).