In The End - Genesis 50

50:1-13 -It must have been such a difficult thing for Jospeh when Jacob died because he obviously loved his father very much, and not only did he love him, but he probably felt very much like the time he did have with him was so limited through no fault of his own. It was very unfair, that both Joseph and Jacob were robbed of their time together, and that must have been very apparent at this point. That’s what I would have done, spiral, be angry and bitter. Joseph breaks down and cries for his father, “and wept upon him, and kissed him.” I don’t get it, it’s very foreign to me, but Joseph is certainly struggling with it at this point.

Joseph orders “his servants the physicians to embalm his father,” and they did, but even though this sentence seems insignificant, TB points out that it is actually very important. By this point, the Egyptians have perfected the art of embalming the dead, but it was a religious ceremony, meaning that the embalming was done by the priests of Osiris, which would have been spiritually offensive to both Jacob and Joseph. So the sentence that Joseph ordered his physicians to embalm Jacob as opposed to just letting the Egyptians do it in their normal manner is significant.

The whole country of Egypt mourned for Jacob for 70 days, apparently 40 for embalming and then 30 for mourning. I’m confident that the Egyptian people didn’t care about Jacob and might have even been a little resentful about being forced to participate in the death ritual for the father of someone they didn’t like.

After the mourning period was over, Joseph asked Pharoah if he could be allowed to return to Canaan with his father’s body to inter him there in the cave that Abraham bought. Pharoah agrees and sends not only Joseph’s whole family, except the smallest children, but also a huge military and civilian entourage. This isn’t just because Pharoah respects Joseph so much but because he wants to make sure that Joseph returns to Egypt when he’s done. TB points out that the famine is over and so Pharoah doesn’t have a concrete mission for Joseph to fulfill now, but he still wants and needs him around to help him run the government, so the Egyptian procession was as much about ensuring Jospeh’s safe and timely return as it was to make Joseph feel supported by his boss, Pharaoh. This enormous caravan of people traveling the 200 miles from Goshen to Canaan was quite the sight to behold, and the locals they passed noted that this must have been a very important person to garner such an auspicious funeral journey.

50:14-26 – After Jacob’s body is returned to Canaan and laid to rest in the cave Abraham bought, Joseph and his brothers return to Egypt, Goshen specifically, and in what must have been a very frustrating event for Joseph, his brothers start to get nervous that perhaps all the good will extended from Joseph to his brothers might be over now that their father is dead. They start to wonder amongst themselves, “Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which he did unto him.” I don’t know if they are just paranoid, or if it’s their guilty conscience, or if they are just projecting the kind of hatred they would still harbor for someone who had wronged them so terribly. Either way, They were nervous.

The brothers send a message to Jospeh basically saying, “remember, dad commanded you to forgive us.” Joseph must have been exasperated, because upon getting this message, “Joseph wept when they spake unto him.” Joseph’s reaction to his brothers is so very inspiring and honestly something that I’ve really been thinking about for the last couple of days. He says, “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.”

The overall message of Joseph’s response is, basically, “whatever evil you guys did to me, God used it for good.” To me, the message is, and this is something Jesus has been trying to tell me for quite some time, “the exact place that I am in my life, all my experiences, everything I have, and everything that I am, is exactly where God needs me to be at this moment. For whatever reason, this is the situation that God has deemed necessary for me to learn, grow, and become what he needs me to be to fulfill the mission that he has for me to do.”

Basically, any experience, any sadness, any trauma, anything, has happened so that God can transform me into what he needs. It’s hard to look at the painful parts of life and let go of the anger and sadness and blame the people responsible for it and think, “this is no one’s responsibility but God’s and it had to be this way.” I’m going to have to think about that more. TB talks about it quite a bit, saying, “I pray that God will make me like Joseph, that I can fully understand that the offenses committed by others upon me could ONLY happen if God allowed them. How often I have looked back upon the trails and sins of my own lie, and realized that the blessed place God has led me to could NOT have happened any other way than the way it did. Now, if I can just feel that way for the unresolved things… things that still hurt, things that I still can’t make any sense of, that only God knows why it was necessary.”

Joseph lives to see his great grandchildren, and before he dies, he prophesies to them what we read in 2 Nephi 3 and made them promise to take his “bones” to lie with his fathers, not immediately like they did with Jacob, but when the people as a whole leave Egypt and go back to Canaan. He lived to be 110 years old and died and was embalmed and put into a coffin in Egypt. It could be that he lived to be literally 110 years old or that might have been the number used by the writer to symbolize that he had lived a long and prosperous life.