When Joseph saw that life was gone, he prostrated himself beside his father, kissed him and wept over him, and remained with him in death, alone, in bitter grief.
Then to the physicians who were in his service, men skilled in the embalming of the dead, he entrusted the body of his father, and they embalmed it with precious salts and spices and swathed it in the finest linen. And not only Jacob’s sons and their households mourned for him, but Pharaoh himself, his chief counsellors and his whole court and the Egyptians throughout Egypt, from the highest to the lowest, mourned for him also. Seventy days was the period of Egypt’s mourning for this stranger, for the story of how Joseph, Pharaoh’s renowned vizier, had as by a wonder been restored to his father and to his brethren, long after he had been given up for dead, was known throughout the whole country, from one end of it to the other.
And Joseph made known to Pharaoh that he had solemnly sworn to his father that his body should be buried not in Egypt, since it was a country strange to him, but in the land of Canaan, where he was born, and in the tomb of Isaac his father.
‘Give me leave, I pray thee, then,’ he said, ‘to absent myself from Egypt awhile, that I may keep the vow I made to my father when he was nearing death and bury him in the place where he himself desired to rest. Then will I return again.’ And Pharaoh consented.
A very great company went up out of Egypt to Jacob’s burial, for not only Joseph himself with his brothers and all their households, except only their little ones, followed his father to the grave, but also the chief officers of Pharaoh’s palace, the governors of the cities of Egypt, and the stewards whom Joseph had appointed over the granaries. There went with them also an escort of many chariots and a multitude of horsemen.
When this great concourse had come into Canaan, to the threshing-floor of Atad that was beyond Jordan, the mourners who followed after the gilded coffin containing the embalmed body of Jacob, lifted up their voices and made lament with dirges and wailings. There Joseph and the lords of Egypt that were with him mourned for his father seven days.
When the people of Canaan who dwelt near the Jordan heard this great mourning and lamentation, they marvelled. ‘Of a surety,’ they said, one to another, ‘this must be a day of sore sorrow and bitterness to the Egyptians.’
And afterwards, Joseph and his brethren went on alone and the body of their father was laid to rest beside his father Isaac, in the tomb hewn out of the rock at Machpelah, which Abraham, Isaac’s father, had himself purchased and prepared for his own burial-place. Then Joseph and all who had accompanied him into Canaan returned into Egypt.
The funeral pomp and ceremonies of the Egyptians, and the great cavalcade that had gone up with them into Canaan were to his brothers a fresh revelation of Joseph’s sovran power in the land. And when they were alone together again, mere shepherds and overseers of cattle, they were seized with misgivings.
The fear had suddenly come upon them that maybe it was only while their father was still alive that Joseph had refrained from requiting them all the evil they had done against him; that through the years which had gone by he had been merely concealing his hatred of them, biding his time; and that now the day had come when his full vengeance would sweep down upon them.
A messenger was sent; for they feared to see him. By him they made known to Joseph that when their father was lying sick to death they had themselves confessed their act of lying treachery against him, after they had sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites.