Jacob Mourned Twenty-Two Years for a Son Still Alive

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They Brought a Coat and No Brother

Jacob had been anxious for days. He had sent Joseph to check on his brothers at Shechem, and then the road went quiet. He sent a slave racing after the boy. Too much time had passed.

When the brothers came home they were not carrying their brother. They were carrying a coat. They had torn it, dipped it in goat's blood, and aged it until it looked like the thing they needed it to look like. They held it out without speaking.

Jacob took it in both hands. The wool was stiff. The blood had dried in ridges. He said, "It is my son's coat. A wild beast has devoured him. Joseph is without doubt torn in pieces." He tore his own clothes. He put on sackcloth. He sat down to mourn a son who was, at that hour, already walking toward Egypt in a caravan that would not turn around.

He Refused Every Comfort They Offered

His children and grandchildren gathered around him and tried to soften it. They spoke the words people speak. He refused. "I will go down to my son mourning into Sheol (שאול), the underworld where the dead go," he said. He would not be consoled. He wept. He kept weeping.

Grief for the dead, however fierce, eventually loosens. Time works on it. A man can bury a body and, years later, eat at a table again. Jacob's mourning did not loosen. The sackcloth stayed on. The house learned the sound of a father who would not come back from a loss that had not, in fact, happened.

Somewhere under the weeping, below the place where a man makes an account, his heart would not close the file. The living cannot be mourned into acceptance. Joseph was not dead. The father's body knew it before his mouth did, and so the ritual had nothing to finish.

Twenty-Two Years Against Twenty-Two

Joseph had been sold at seventeen. He was thirty when Pharaoh lifted him out of prison. The years of plenty ran seven years. The famine began. Joseph was thirty-nine when his brothers came to Egypt for the first time. Jacob had been mourning for twenty-two years.

In the nights he counted. He had been away from his father Isaac for twenty-two years while he lived with Laban in Padan-Aram. He had not stood in that house to honor the old man. He had fled with a stolen blessing and a staff, and the years had piled up on the other side of the river. Now the same span sat on him as a father. A son's absence, returned.

He did not call it justice. He sat in the sackcloth and felt the number close around him like a belt. What he had done to Isaac had come back as a father experiencing his own son's absence, measure for measure, year for year, and the coat still hung in the room like a witness that would not fade.

The Wagons Reached What Words Could Not

His sons came back from Egypt breathless. They said Joseph was alive. They said he was second to Pharaoh. Jacob heard the words and they did not go in. Twenty-two years of grief had built him around the certainty of a torn body. He had no category left for a living son in a palace.

He was beside himself. The room tilted. Then the wagons arrived.

Joseph had sent wagons to carry his father down to Egypt. Jacob put his hand on the wood. He felt the grain. He walked the length of one wagon and back. The spirit in him revived, not at a sentence, at a wheel and a board. Here was a living son's provision, heavy enough to touch. He believed it because he could lean on it.

"It is enough," he said. "Joseph my son is yet alive. I will go and see him before I die."

They Wept and Said Nothing

He did not pack at once. He stood in the shock of what was being returned to him and let the years sit there, all twenty-two of them, before he moved. Then he went down to Egypt.

When they met, Jacob fell on Joseph's neck and wept for a long time. Joseph wept on his father. No word passed between them in that embrace. The years had already used up the language. A reunion that large has to happen in silence, because it has been going on the whole time the sackcloth was on, and the mouth is too small for it.

The coat was gone. The wagons stood in the yard. The old man held a son who had been alive in the dark of every one of those years, and still he wept as if the wild beast had only just left the field.