The last chapter of Genesis opens with Joseph weeping over the body of Israel. He has his father’s corpse embalmed in a forty-day process. This is an Egyptian custom rather than the traditional practice of shepherds. Joseph tells Pharaoh about his father’s death and the Egyptians weep for him for seventy days. They are honoring his father because of their gratitude to Joseph’s wisdom and leadership. 

Joseph requests special permission to take his father’s body out to the wilderness to bury Israel along with the his ancestors at the caves purchased by Abraham for Sarah’s body two generations earlier. With the Pharaoh’s blessing, a large company travels the roughly three hundred miles. They stop at the threshing floor of Atad and grieve loudly for seven days. This catches the attention of the local people of Canaan and they called the place Abel-Mizraim, the meadow of the Egyptians. 

When they get home, Joseph’s brothers are afraid that in their father’s absence, Joseph will finally punish them for their earlier act of selling him into slavery. They come to him with a half-baked story about Israel’s last wish is that he should forgive them. Joseph has to convince them that he truly believes that God’s providence was at work the whole time, and he is holding nothing against them. The second hardest part of forgiveness is truly believing it. 

Joseph lives to 110 years old, long enough to see three generations of Ephraim and the grand-children of Manasseh. He tells his family that God has promised to return them  all to the lands promised to their ancestors. He asks to be buried there as well. (It will be nearly five hundred years before that occurs.)

This is the end of the beginning of the history of the Israelites, and the Earth as well. It’s a happy, but incomplete. Everyone is at peace, the sibling rivalry is quelled and the whole land had been spared the worst of the famine. However, all the farmland and herds and the people are own and controlled by Pharaoh. Stay tuned for the sequel.