Genesis 50:1-14

THE FUNERAL OF JACOB, Genesis 50:1-14.

“The royal obsequies of Israel and Joseph fittingly end the history of the patriarchal age, and the first stage in the development of the covenant people. The father of Joseph was buried with all the magnificence of an Egyptian funeral. No prophet, or prince, or king of Israel’s line, even in the noontide glory of the Hebrew monarchy, was ever laid to his rest with such pomp and splendour. The funeral ceremony was, with the Egyptians, an elegant art, in which they concentrated their religion and highest philosophy, and on which they lavished their taste and wealth. Their belief in immortality, and in the re-union of the soul with the body after transmigration, led them to carve magnificent sepulchres out of their mountains, and decorate them with all the splendours of painting and architecture, where the embalmed body, fresh in feature and fragrant in smell, might wait, as in a palace hall, to welcome the spirit on its return from its wanderings. Thus the Greek historian, Diodorus, says that the Egyptians built only inns for the living, but eternal habitations for the dead. The temples and tombs of Egypt are not only the oldest and most massive monuments of the past, but are also monuments of man’s faith in God and the future state, which have endured from the earliest dawn of civilization.

“Magnificent funeral processions are pictured in the royal tombs of Thebes. Such an imposing pageant is here described, though with such unworldly simplicity as almost to escape the eye, when ‘all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, and all the house of Joseph, and his brethren, and his father’s house,’ leaving only their ‘little ones’ in the land of Goshen, with ‘chariots and horsemen,’ a ‘very great company,’ (Genesis 50:7-9,) set forth from the land of Goshen on a funeral march of three hundred miles, through the desert, round the Dead Sea, to the banks of the Jordan, and halted there for seven days’ funeral rites, such as the land of Canaan never witnessed before or after, and which stamped the meadow with the name, ‘Mourning (place) of the Egyptians.’” Newhall.