Biblion Bible Commentary
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Two burials, and a coffin in Egypt
Genesis 49:29-50:26
29 He instructed them, and said to them, “I am to be gathered to my people. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, · WEB
The book ends with the deepest sentence in it about God and evil, and then with a body waiting in a box for a promise not yet kept.
Jacob's last instruction is about a cave, and he recites the deed: the field of Ephron, at Machpelah, before Mamre, bought from the children of Heth. He lists who is in it — Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and there I buried Leah.
Leah. The wife he did not choose and did not love, whom he married by a trick and lived with for decades, is the one lying in the family grave, and he is asking to be laid beside her. Rachel is by a road near Bethlehem. He never says why, and the arrangement says it for him.
He gathered up his feet into the bed, breathed his last breath, and was gathered to his people. The description is of a man composing himself and stopping, and the phrase for what follows is the same one used of Abraham and Isaac.
What Egypt does with him is remarkable. Forty days of embalming and seventy days of mourning — a period approaching what was given to a Pharaoh — and then a state funeral procession: the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, all the elders of Egypt, chariots and horsemen. The Canaanites who watch it pass name the place after what they see, a grievous mourning by the Egyptians.
An empire buries a shepherd in a foreign country because his son asked.
Then the brothers panic, and their fear is entirely in character: It may be that Joseph will hate us, and will fully pay us back for all the evil which we did to him. Seventeen years of provision and kindness have not convinced them, because they have been reading his conduct as forbearance in their father's presence.
They send a message rather than coming, and they attribute it to Jacob — Your father commanded before he died — which may be true and is not recorded anywhere, and then they come anyway and fall down: Behold, we are your servants.
It is the dream again, one last time, and it is the last thing Joseph wants.
Joseph wept when they spoke to him. After twenty-two years apart and seventeen together, they still think he is waiting for a chance. That is what the weeping is about.
And then the sentence the whole book has been building toward, and there is nothing else quite like it in Scripture: As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to save many people alive, as is happening today.
Both verbs are the same word, and both subjects are meant. They intended evil — it is called evil, to their faces, by the man they did it to, at the end of his life, with nothing softened. And God intended the identical event for good, and the good is stated in numbers of people fed.
What the sentence refuses to do is choose. It does not say the brothers were tools without wills, and it does not say the outcome makes the crime acceptable. It says one act had two authors with opposite intentions, and God's held. That is the answer this book gives to the problem of a world where the promise runs through pits, prisons, famines and betrayals — and it is given by a man who lost thirteen years to it.
His question before it is the other half: am I in the place of God? Vengeance would require a standing he does not have. He is not the judge of these men, and having declined the office, he can feed them.
The last paragraph is quiet and unfinished on purpose. Joseph sees great-grandchildren, and then: I am dying, but God will surely visit you, and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. He is certain of a return he will not see, and he binds them by oath to carry his bones.
And the final words of the book are five: a coffin in Egypt.
The man who was carried down as a slave is left in a box, above ground, unburied, waiting. Genesis ends with a promise outstanding and a body that refuses to be at home. Four centuries later a man leading a nation out of that country stops to collect it Exodus 13:19, and Joshua buries it at Shechem in the plot Jacob bought Joshua 24:32.
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