Forgiveness and a Coffin Pointed Toward Hope

God promised Jacob at Beersheba that “Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes” (46:4). The verse keeps that promise in its own way: Joseph falls upon his father’s face. Every other embrace in Genesis falls on the neck (33:4; 45:14; 46:29); this one falls on the face.

Egyptian embalming was the work of specialist embalmers, a priestly craft, yet Joseph uses his court physicians, rofe’im, healers. Some have seen in that a way of avoiding the religious rites that went with the priests’ work; it is an inference. Jacob and Joseph are the only two people in the Bible who are embalmed.

Herodotus describes bodies kept seventy days in natron (Histories 2.86), and Diodorus reports that Egypt mourned a dead king for seventy-two days. Seventy days for Jacob is close to royal honours. Israel would later mourn Aaron and Moses thirty days each (Numbers 20:29; Deuteronomy 34:8).

Joseph, second in the land, asks the palace to speak for him instead of going in himself. The likeliest reason is mourning: a man unshaven and in mourning clothes did not enter a king’s presence, as no one could come to the Persian king’s gate “clothed with sackcloth” (Esther 4:2). That is an inference; the verse gives no reason.

“Which I have digged for me” renders karithi, which may also mean “which I bought”; the same verb is used for buying in Hosea 3:2. Abraham bought the cave, and Jacob may mean the place he had prepared in it. Joseph adds his own promise at the end, “I will come again”, to settle Pharaoh’s mind.

Pharaoh’s answer is short and turns on the oath. The Talmud tells that Pharaoh would have refused, and let Joseph go only because an oath had been sworn (Sotah 36b). The oath Jacob insisted on in 47:31 does exactly the work it was meant to do.

The phrase “went up” is used three times in the verse. An Egyptian state funeral climbs out of Egypt into Canaan, with the elders of Pharaoh’s house and of the whole land walking beside Jacob’s sons.

The children and animals stay in Goshen, a pledge of return. When Moses asks to go and worship, Pharaoh will try the same terms, first keeping back the little ones and then the flocks: “only let your flocks and your herds be stayed” (Exodus 10:24).

“Chariots and horsemen” are the pair that will pursue Israel to the sea: “all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh, and his horsemen” (Exodus 14:9). Here they ride as an honour guard for Israel’s father.

Atad means bramble, the thorn that Jotham’s parable makes king of the trees (Judges 9:14). The seven days of mourning became Israel’s custom: seven days for Saul (1 Samuel 31:13), seven days of silence beside Job (Job 2:13), and the shiva still kept in Jewish homes.

Abel-mizraim is a pun. Evel means mourning, and the place name abel means meadow; the Canaanites’ remark turns “meadow of Egypt” into “mourning of Egypt”. The name remembers the event by what outsiders saw: Egyptians grieving.

“His sons” are all twelve, the ones Jacob blessed and the ones he rebuked alike, carrying out one command together. A midrash says Jacob even assigned who should bear the coffin on each side, in the order the tribes would later camp around the tabernacle.

The Egyptians escort the body, but only the sons carry it into Canaan and into the cave. The description of Machpelah is the third full one in the book (23:17–20; 49:29–32), each giving the seller, the field and the purchase, as a family repeats the title to what it owns.

Joseph keeps his word to Pharaoh, “I will come again” (verse 5). The family has stood in Canaan, buried its father in the only ground it owns, and goes back to Egypt to live.

“Hate us” is satam, to nurse a grudge. It is the verb used when “Esau hated Jacob” and resolved to kill him once “the days of mourning for my father are at hand” (27:41). The brothers fear that Joseph has been waiting as Esau once did.

They do not go themselves at first; they send word through someone else, as they once sent the coat to their father. The Talmud read this verse as permission to alter a report for the sake of peace (Yevamot 65b), assuming Jacob gave no such command.

Three words for wrong are stacked together: pesha, trespass; chatta’t, sin; ra’ah, evil. They are the words of Exodus 34:7, “forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”. The brothers call themselves not his brothers but “the servants of the God of thy father”. Joseph weeps for the last time in the book.

“We be thy servants” uses avadim, slaves, the word for what Joseph was sold to be. It is the offer Judah made when the cup was found (44:16), now made again when nothing has been found at all.

“Am I in the place of God?” is word for word what Jacob said to Rachel when she demanded children: “Am I in God’s stead?” (30:2). The father refused to play God over a womb; the son refuses to play God over his brothers’ guilt.

“As it is this day” points to the living people around them: the family in Goshen and the Egyptians who said “thou hast saved our lives” (47:25). “Much people” is am rav, a great people. Joseph measures the outcome by the number fed.

“Spake kindly unto them” is literally “spoke to their heart”, the idiom used when Shechem spoke to Dinah (34:3), when Boaz spoke to Ruth (Ruth 2:13), and in Isaiah 40:2: “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem.” It is the second “fear not” in three verses.

Joseph was fifty-six when Jacob died, so he lived another fifty-four years in Egypt. Joshua, his descendant through Ephraim, also died at a hundred and ten (Joshua 24:29), and was buried near where Joseph’s bones were laid at Shechem (Joshua 24:32).

“The third generation” is shileshim, the word of “unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5). Machir’s line took Gilead (Numbers 32:39), and Deborah’s song names Machir for the whole of Manasseh: “Out of Machir came down governors” (Judges 5:14).

“Will surely visit you” is paqod yifqod, the verb doubled. Moses is told to speak these very words to the elders of Israel: “I have surely visited you” (Exodus 3:16), so they would know the deliverer. It is also the first time the oath is said to have been sworn “to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob”, all three together.

Moses keeps this oath: “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” out of Egypt (Exodus 13:19), and they were buried at Shechem (Joshua 24:32). Hebrews 11:22 counts it as faith that Joseph “gave commandment concerning his bones”.

“Coffin” is aron, the same word as the ark of the covenant. A midrash notes that in the wilderness Israel carried two arks side by side, Joseph’s coffin and the ark of the law. The Book of Genesis opens with the creation of the heavens and the earth and closes with a coffin and the words “in Egypt”.