Jacob Swore to Return to Canaan and Elijah Ran Through It in Despair

The Dying Man's Demand

Jacob was dying in Egypt, surrounded by comfort, and his one urgent demand was about geography. He summoned Joseph and required an oath: do not bury me here. Carry my bones back to the land. The request had nothing sentimental about it. Jacob had spent twenty years in exile in Aram, returned to Canaan to find it no safer than he had left it, buried Rachel on a roadside in Ephrath, nearly lost Benjamin to Simeon's imprisonment, and finally been dragged by famine to a foreign kingdom where his son happened to be second in command. He had no illusions about Canaan being comfortable. He wanted to be buried there anyway.

The midrashic tradition preserved in Bereshit Rabbah, the great collection on Genesis compiled in the Land of Israel around the fourth to fifth century CE, reads Jacob's deathbed plea as a covenant assertion. The land was the physical anchor of the promise God had made to Abraham and passed through Isaac and directly to Jacob himself. Jacob's body belonged there not because Canaan was pleasant but because the covenant was real, and the covenant was territorial, and to be buried anywhere else would be to concede that the covenant's claim on the land could be overridden by circumstance.

What the Land Had Cost Him

Jacob's relationship with Canaan was built from losses. He had left it running from Esau with nothing. He had returned from Laban's household to find that the twenty years away had not made anything easier. The wrestling at the Jabbok, the naming as Israel, the incident at Shechem with its violence and its aftermath, the death of Rachel within sight of Bethlehem. He arrived at every significant place in Canaan carrying a new scar. The land was not shelter. It was struggle. And he wanted to go back to it when he died.

The Targum Jonathan, the Aramaic expansion of the Torah, provides a detail the Torah leaves implicit: when Jacob rose from his deathbed to receive Joseph's oath, he sat up with a straightness that should not have been possible for a sick old man. The oath required full presence. He gave it his full presence. What he was swearing about mattered more than the condition of his body.

Elijah at the Same Ground

Centuries later, Elijah ran through the same territory in the opposite direction. He had stood on Carmel and called down fire and killed the prophets of Baal and proved everything he had come to prove, and then Jezebel sent him a message describing in detail how he would be dead by morning, and he fled. He ran south through the land Jacob had sworn his bones would return to, and he ran until he was a day's journey into the wilderness and sat down under a broom tree and asked God to take his life. He had had enough. He was no better than his fathers.

The tradition that connects Jacob and Elijah is preserved in the aggadic sources treated in Legends of the Jews. They were not simply two figures who happened to pass through the same territory. They were bound by the same covenant, the same claim on the land, the same obligation to continue when continuation was painful. Jacob had made his claim on the land from his deathbed in Egypt. Elijah made his refusal of that claim from inside the land itself, in the wilderness, asking to be released from the covenant he was supposed to be upholding.

What the Angel Gave Elijah Under the Tree

God sent an angel who touched Elijah and left him food and water. Twice. The angel's message the second time was specific: get up and eat, because the journey is too long for you. The journey was to Horeb, the mountain of God, the same Sinai where the covenant had been sealed with fire and blood. Elijah ate the food and walked forty days and forty nights on the strength of it to the mountain. He did not walk to rest. He walked to argue.

At Horeb, God asked him what he was doing there. Elijah said he was the only one left who cared, that Israel had abandoned the covenant, broken the altars, killed the prophets. He presented himself as the last faithful man. God told him there were seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal. Elijah's claim to be the last faithful man was wrong. He had run through a land full of the faithful and seen none of them, which was its own kind of failure of vision. Jacob, dying in Egypt, had seen the land clearly from a distance. Elijah, running through it, could not see what was there.