Our parasha brings to a close the story of
Joseph with his death. This narrative is truly a unique genre within Torah; it
has been called its one "novella". In this, it also concludes the whole book of Genesis/Bereshit. It is short, but packs a punch. There is never any doubt who is centre-stage. Not Joseph, but his father, Jacob/Israel.
It is Jacob who gives his farewell discourse (Gen
49:1ff), blessing his sons (albeit sometimes entirely
negatively), in poetry both beautiful and at times impossible to translate (as one may expect, if the impression of archaic
origins is desired). It is Jacob who is expressly mourned by the Egyptians for
seventy days (50.3). It is Jacob whose dying wish is fulfilled, as his remains
are taken, with pomp and ceremony, to his chosen resting-place, with his
ancestors in Canaan (50.7ff). What is more, in the only disagreement between Jacob and Joseph, Jacob
prevails. Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons as his own, but, in doing so, privileges
the second-born Ephraim over the first-born Manasseh, against Joseph’s wishes.
Jacob is clear that, whatever the failings of his eyesight, he knows what he is
doing (48:19f). It is Jacob’s agency which counts.
There is something instructive here, for any who
would make plans to shape their own legacy: it can never wholly be in your control; any
effort to steer others may fail, on many levels.
What of Joseph’s own death – without poetic
farewells, without explicit mourning, without a journey home? He dies at 110 (50.26). Robert Alter, in his notes to his
translation, tells us this is the Egyptian ideal age, over against the 120 years of Hebrew understanding. Joseph is placed
in a coffin – an entirely Egyptian contraption within the Bible. Is there
bathos here? The story that begins with the expanses of the heavens and the
earth ends with its focus reduced to a mummified corpse in a box, a box alien
to the corpse, as alien as the land into which the box is laid. Is this a
warning against assimilation? Is the stage being set for the Pharoah “which
knew not Joseph” (Ex 1.8 KJV), and the wretchedness of slavery?
Something may be lost if this is our only reading of the brief account of Joseph’s death.
Perhaps there is another character in this passage whose legacy is not fully honoured. I refer to Egypt
itself. If we limit ourselves to Genesis, it is only fair to describe Egypt as wholly benign, a
place of refuge, of rescue, for Abraham, as for Jacob and his children. We hear
Joseph say of his own travails: “God intended it for good, so as to bring about
the… survival of many people” (50.20, NJPS). The Hebrew is strong: lehachayot: “to cause to live/to make alive”. That giving of life was
brought about by the synergies of wise Joseph, and (let it be said) attentive
and responsive Pharoah, and the fertility of Egypt itself. We who know the
fuller story may miss here the absence of any strictly religious animosity
between Pharaohs and patriarchs. In Christian language, this has been called
the time of “ecumenical bonhomie” (Gordon Wenham). So Joseph’s coffin, which is
called an “aron”, may in fact be a type of the ark (“aron”) of the covenant to come; it houses a memory of divine
providence.
Biblical Egypt, like every nation since, is not one thing, neither simply refuge, nor simply
oppressor. Just as it is folly to hope – or to fear – that our own legacy will be entirely one predictable and predicted thing. This is to
the good!
Written for Limmud on One Leg, 2025.
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