A Tale of Two Mummies

This is actually two stories, and they take place years apart. The fact of the matter is, I have felt very bogged down in Genesis and that was driving my procrastination with this blog. So I am combining the last two stories in one. They go together, anyway.

Jacob died, and Joseph had him mummified like an Egyptian noble. Though Jacob was a foreigner, Joseph, though a foreigner himself, was now a part of Egyptian nobility. Joseph was so powerful that no honor was spared in the way Jacob was cared for after he died. The entire country of Egypt mourned for Jacob while he was being mummified, just as they would have done for a Pharaoh.

At the end of the mummification, which took well over two months—seventy days to be exact, Joseph sent a message to Pharaoh. The commentaries I looked at made a big deal about Joseph sending a message, rather than going himself. After all, if Joseph was second only to Pharaoh himself, why couldn’t he go into Pharaoh’s presence? The commentaries had two possible explanations for this, and either one makes sense, so you can take your pick which one you like best, and when you get to heaven you can ask Joseph which it was, and see if you were right. Scenario 1: It was considered improper to appear before Pharaoh while in mourning. This was known to be true in other ancient countries, and there’s no reason for it not to be true. Or there’s scenario 2: Perhaps Joseph had experienced a demotion of sorts. Not that he had fallen out of favor with Pharaoh, but the seven years of plenty and the famine were now over, and so the job he had done for Pharaoh during that time was no longer needed. Joseph still had an important government job, but it may not have been so high a position as he had held previously.

Anyway, the message Joseph sent was simply a request for a leave of absence due to bereavement. He explained in the message that his father had made him promise to bury him in Canaan instead of in Egypt, and that they already had a family sepulcher in Canaan. He also promised to return.

Not only did Pharaoh prove agreeable, he sent Joseph and family in style. The Israelites, of whom there were now probably a good many more than the seventy who had come into Egypt some years before, were sent to Canaan along with all the officials of Egypt. All of Jacob’s descendants except those too young to make the journey went along with a large entourage of Egyptians. And when they reached a certain place—not the actual burial ground, the Egyptians who were with them put on such a show of grief that the Canaanites gave the place a new name, a name that meant “Mourning of Egypt.” Jacob, who had once, many years before, fled Canaan with nothing, and had to use a rock for a pillow, was now returned there, and buried with great pomp and circumstance. He was buried in the Cave of Macpelah next to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and his own wife Leah. As far as we know, he was the last person to be buried there.

And then everybody went home to Egypt.

And that’s when Joseph’s brothers got to thinking. And there is definitely such a thing as over-thinking.

The eleven of them got together and discussed what they were thinking. Jacob was dead. What if Joseph’s forgiveness was only for their father’s sake? Would it be revoked now that he was gone? Just as Joseph had sent a messenger to Pharaoh asking for permission to go to Canaan to bury Jacob there, his brothers sent a messenger to him. “Before your father died he commanded you to forgive your brothers for what they did to you.” I have often thought, and one commentator agreed with me, that bringing Jacob into it was a lie invented by the brothers to strengthen their case. But it didn’t matter. With or without the command of Jacob, Joseph had never had any intention of doing anything else, and the request was so painful to him that he wept over it.

The brothers themselves followed the message, and they bowed down to him. This makes me think of Joseph’s prophecy that got him into so much trouble in the first place. Remember his dreams when he was a teenager that his whole family would one day bow down to him? After all, when the brothers did it before, they didn’t know it was Joseph. Now they did, and they came and bowed down, telling him they would be his servants.

And Joseph gave him his answer, one of the most beautiful expressions of forgiveness you could ever find: “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children (Genesis 50: 19-21).”

Years after years went by, and finally, Joseph was 110 years old. He was not nearly as old as his father had been when he died, and his father had died at a much younger age than either Abraham or Isaac. But Joseph’s time was up and he knew it. He had lived an amazing life. From his earliest beginnings as the favored son of his father, he had spent thirteen years as a slave and prisoner, and then a full eighty years as a ruler in Egypt. He had played with his great-grandchildren.

He was not what Jacob was to the children of Israel, but he was still the principal member of the family, the son who had the rights of the firstborn, though he was far, far from firstborn. He had the clout to call all the descendants of Jacob together, and they came—though probably only the men, I suppose. He had orders and a prophecy, just as Jacob had had. Not a long one, nor an individual message to the tribes or even to his own sons, but a prophecy, nonetheless.

“I’m about to die,” he said. “A time is coming when God is going to come to you and take you out of Egypt and return you to Canaan. When that time comes, take my bones and bury them in Canaan.”

All the commentators remarked on Joseph’s prophecy of the Exodus, but nobody seemed to think of what I thought of, so I could be totally off base here, but it seems to me that Joseph prophesied not only the Exodus, but also the need for the Exodus. When Joseph said what he did, the Israelites were not yet slaves, but were well-respected as Joseph’s kin. The NIV, which I am more used to but which was not available to the writers of the commentaries I am using—very old, public domain commentaries—says, “God will surely come to your aid…” King James says that Joseph said that God would “visit” them. Even then, though help is not mentioned, it is implied they will not get out of Egypt without the hand of God behind their going. But from the Israelites’ perspective at the time that Joseph made this statement, would they have seen any need to have to have help to leave the country? Was Joseph hinting at something here? If he was, he may not have been giving a new prophesy, but hinting at an old prophecy that would have already been passed down to them. Many years before their time, when God had made His covenant with Abraham, He had told Abraham: “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:13-14).”

But a lot of times, when God tells us something negative, we, who want everything to be positive, don’t pay much attention. A few years ago a ladies’ Bible study I was part of decided to study the book of Revelation. I noticed a verse during that study that was absolutely shocking to me: “He [the beast] was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them (Revelation 13:7).” To do what? Conquer the saints? Given that saints are Christians, not especially holy people as the word is often used today, this was not good news to read. But of course it doesn’t stop there, and we do end up winning in the end. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that at the moment of being conquered, it might be hard to remember that. And here and now, before that conquering has occurred, and living in a country where we do have a large measure of religious freedom, it’s hard to imagine anything like that ever actually happening. I wonder if that’s how Joseph’s brothers and nephews and great-nephews felt when he implied they would need God’s help to get out of Egypt. But we know the end of the story. A pharaoh came to power who did not know Joseph and conquered the Israelites and made them slaves. They did in fact need help from God to get out. And they did in fact get out with great possessions, just as God had said they would.

And when they did, they did as Joseph asked and took his mummified body to be buried in Canaan. Joseph, however, was not buried in Macpelah. He was buried in Shechem. Remember that place? If not, you can read my entry titled “The Time to Take Your Kids to Church,” or better yet you can read about it in the Bible in Genesis 34. You would think that the tribes of Simeon or Levi would have gotten that land, since they had personally conquered it. But they had conquered it wrongly, and because of that the tribes that their descendants became did not get their own inheritance. They land Simeon and Levi took went to their brother they once sold to keep from inheriting what they thought should have been theirs.