Genesis 50

¹ At this Joseph threw himself on his father, covering his face with tears and kissing him.

² Then Joseph ordered the doctors in his service to embalm his father. The doctors embalmed Israel,

³ and it took them forty days, for embalming takes forty days to complete. The Egyptians mourned him for seventy days.

⁴ When the period of mourning for him was over, Joseph said to Pharaoh’s household, ‘If I may presume to enjoy your favour, please see that this message reaches Pharaoh’s ears,

⁵ “My father made me swear an oath: I am about to die, he said, I have a tomb which I dug for myself in the land of Canaan, and there you must bury me. So now I seek leave to go up and bury my father, and then I shall come back.”‘

⁶ Pharaoh replied, ‘Go up and bury your father, in accordance with the oath he made you swear’.

⁷ Joseph went up to bury his father, all Pharaoh’s servants and the palace dignitaries going up with him, joined by all the dignitaries of the land of Egypt,

⁸ as well as all Joseph’s family and his brothers, along with his father’s family. They left no one in the land of Goshen but their dependants, with their flocks and their cattle.

⁹ Chariots also and horsemen went up with them; it was a very large retinue.

¹⁰ On arriving at Goren-ha-atad, which is across the Jordan, they performed there a long and solemn lamentation, and Joseph observed three days’ mourning for his father.

¹¹ When the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, witnessed the mourning at Goren-ha-atad they exclaimed, ‘This is a solemn act of mourning for the Egyptians’. For this reason they call this place Abel-mizraim[*a] – it is across the Jordan.

¹² His sons did what he had ordered them to do for him.

¹³ His sons carried him to the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave in the field at Machpelah opposite Mamre, which Abraham had bought from Ephron the Hittite as a burial-plot.

¹⁴ Then Joseph returned to Egypt, he and his brothers, along with all those who had come up with him for his father’s burial.

¹⁵ Seeing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, ‘What if Joseph intends to treat us as enemies and repay us in full for all the wrong we did him?’

¹⁶ So they sent this message to Joseph: ‘Before your father died he gave us this order:

¹⁷ “You must say to Joseph: Oh forgive your brothers their crime and their sin and all the wrong they did you” . Now therefore, we beg you, forgive the crime of the servants of your father’s God.’ Joseph wept at the message they sent to him.

¹⁸ His brothers came themselves and fell down before him. ‘We present ourselves before you’ they said ‘as your slaves.’

¹⁹ But Joseph answered them, ‘Do not be afraid; is it for me to put myself in God’s place?

²⁰ The evil you planned to do me has by God’s design been turned to good, that he might bring about, as indeed he has, the deliverance of a numerous people.

²¹ So you need not be afraid; I myself will provide for you and your dependants.’ In this way he reassured them with words that touched their hearts.

²² So Joseph stayed in Egypt with his father’s family; and Joseph lived a hundred and ten years.

²³ Joseph saw the third generation of Ephraim’s children, as also the children of Machir, Manasseh’s son, who were born on Joseph’s lap.

²⁴ At length Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am about to die; but God will be sure to remember you kindly and take you back from this country to the land that he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’.

²⁵ And Joseph made Israel’s sons swear an oath, ‘When God remembers you with kindness be sure to take my bones from here’.

²⁶ Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten; they embalmed him and laid him in his coffin in Egypt.