Joseph's Final Days

Joseph falls on his father's face and weeps. He orders the physicians to embalm Jacob, which takes forty days, and Egypt mourns for him seventy days. With Pharaoh's permission, a vast procession goes up to Canaan: Pharaoh's officials, the elders of Egypt, all Joseph's household, chariots and horsemen, "a very great company."

At the threshing floor of Atad they mourn for seven days, so loudly that the Canaanites call the place Abel-mizraim, "mourning of Egypt." Jacob's sons carry him to the cave of Machpelah, as he asked, and return to Egypt.

Now the brothers are afraid. "Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him." They send a message, saying their father left instructions that Joseph should forgive them, and then come and fall down before him: "we be thy servants." Their dreamer's dream comes true one last time.

Joseph weeps. "Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones." And he comforts them and speaks kindly to them.

Joseph lives to 110 and sees his great-grandchildren. As he dies he says to his brothers, "God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob." He makes them swear to carry his bones up from Egypt. "So Joseph died… and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt."

Egyptian embalming

Egyptian mummification removed the internal organs, dried the body in natron salt, and wrapped it in linen. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, says the body lay in natron for seventy days. Genesis gives forty days for the embalming and seventy days of mourning. Both numbers fit Egyptian practice, which varied by period and status. Jacob and Joseph are the only people in the Bible said to be embalmed in this way.

A hundred and ten years

Joseph dies at 110, the ideal Egyptian lifespan. Egyptian texts wish people 110 years, and the sage Ptahhotep and the official Amenhotep son of Hapu were remembered as reaching it. Joshua also dies at 110 (Joshua 24:29). The number would have meant "a perfect life" to an Egyptian reader.

Joseph's bones

The promise is kept. Moses takes Joseph's bones out of Egypt (Exodus 13:19), and they are buried at Shechem in the plot Jacob had bought (Joshua 24:32). A tomb near Nablus has been venerated as Joseph's tomb for centuries; its identification is a matter of tradition.