Esau Blocked Jacob's Burial and a Deaf Warrior Cut Off His Head

The Bed of Ivory and the Eulogy of the Cedar

Jacob's funeral began before the mourning was finished. Joseph laid his father on a couch of ivory framed with pure gold, inlaid with precious stones and secured with cords of fine linen. Fervent wines were poured and costly perfumes burned. The chiefs of Esau's house stood in attendance. Then Judah, called in Targum Jonathan "the Lion of Judah, the strength of his brethren," rose to deliver the eulogy.

His speech compared Jacob to a date palm, a vine, and a cedar: a tree whose shade protected everyone near it, whose fruit sustained the nations, whose very form reached to the top of heaven. When the cedar falls, Judah said, every bird that nested in its branches must mourn. The metaphor was functional as well as poetic. Jacob had been the organizational principle of the family, the structure around which seventy souls had arranged themselves. His death was not just a personal loss. It was a structural event.

The mourning lasted seventy days in Egypt. Targum Jonathan adds a detail the Hebrew text withholds: during those seventy days, the famine that had been devastating Canaan ceased. Jacob's righteousness had been protecting people he never met. His death was felt in the food supply.

The Procession Through Canaan

What followed was, by ancient standards, an extraordinary state event. Genesis 50 describes the procession briefly: chariots, horsemen, a very large company. Targum Jonathan on Genesis 50, the ancient Aramaic translation from first-century Palestine, records the composition in detail. Pharaoh's court officials attended. The elders of Egypt came. The twelve tribes marched in the formation Moses would later use when the nation crossed the wilderness, each tribe in its designated position. The procession was so massive that the people of Canaan watching from a distance called the place Abel-Mizraim, the meadow of Egypt's mourning, because the depth of Egyptian grief visible in the marching column was unlike anything they had seen.

And then the procession reached the cave of Machpelah at Hebron, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Leah were buried. Where Jacob expected to be buried. Where Esau was waiting.

The Claim at the Cave Door

Esau arrived with a legal objection and a military posture. The cave of Machpelah had additional burial space, he declared, and that remaining space was his by right of birth, not Jacob's. He had been robbed, twice, of what was owed him. He was not moving.

The confrontation that followed was the culminating episode in a lifetime of conflict. Naphtali, swift of foot, was dispatched to Egypt to retrieve the deed of sale by which Jacob had purchased Esau's share of the burial plot. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserving older legendary material, records that while the deed was being retrieved, Judah's patience gave out. He had already delivered the eulogy. He had led the procession. He was not going to hold Jacob's body at a property line while Esau performed a legal maneuver. The standoff intensified.

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel adds a full military context. Esau had gathered this opposition years earlier, when Leah died. He had arrived at Jacob's house with four thousand soldiers while the family was in mourning, armored and armed. Jacob had climbed the tower wall and called to his brother with words of peace. Esau had ignored every word. The bitterness between them had never been resolved. The cave door was simply the last place it was going to be expressed.

The Deaf Warrior Who Settled the Dispute

Dan's son Chushim was deaf. He had followed the procession from Egypt, had stood through the confrontation at the cave, and could not follow the legal arguments being made or the counter-arguments being offered or the extended negotiation about the deed that was on its way from Egypt. He watched his grandfather's body waiting in front of a closed cave while his uncles argued with a man who kept saying no.

According to the rabbinic tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sotah, Chushim finally asked what the delay was. Someone explained: Esau is blocking the burial. Esau is claiming the plot. The deed is being retrieved from Egypt.

Chushim said: and while all this happens, my grandfather lies dishonored in front of the cave?

He took his sword and cut off Esau's head. Esau's head rolled into the cave and landed in the lap of Isaac, his father, according to the Talmudic tradition. The deed arrived from Egypt shortly after. Jacob was buried.