Joseph Arranged His Own Funeral Before He Died

Joseph died in Egypt, but he did not intend to stay there. He made his brothers swear an oath before he died: when God brought Israel out of Egypt, they would carry his bones with them (Genesis 50:25). He believed the promise to Abraham completely. He believed the Exodus would happen. He died in the knowledge that his bones were a debt the generation of liberation would have to pay, and he trusted them to pay it.

What the tradition adds to this is the specificity of his instructions about how the carrying would be done. The midrashic account preserved in Ginzberg records that Joseph gathered his brothers before his death and charged them first against idolatry in any form. He forbade blasphemous speech. Then he gave them the order of the bier.

He said: Joseph, being king, shall not help carry it. Levi, who is destined to carry the Ark of the Shekinah, shall not carry it either. Judah, Issachar, and Zebulon shall take the front. Reuben, Simeon, and Gad shall hold the right side. Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin shall carry the back. Dan, Asher, and Naphtali shall hold the left side. This was also the order in which the tribes bearing their standards would march through the desert, with the Shekinah dwelling in the midst of them.

Joseph was arranging his funeral to match the structure of a civilization that did not yet exist. The tribes had not yet been assigned their standards. The order of march through the wilderness was a pattern that would not be formally established until the book of Numbers, centuries and hundreds of thousands of births later. Joseph, dying in Egypt, laid out the formation from inside the future he believed was coming.

The midrashic tradition on Numbers 9 records a dispute about who was actually carrying Joseph's coffin at the time of the Exodus. Rabbi Yishmael said they were the bearers of Joseph's coffin itself. Rabbi Akiva said they were men who had become ritually impure by contact with the bodies of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron's sons who had died before the altar. Rabbi Yitzchak took a third position: they were men who had become impure through contact with an abandoned body, a met mitzvah, someone no one else was available to bury.

What unified all three opinions was the underlying observation: the men who came before Moses and Aaron on Passover eve asking for a second chance at the Passover offering were devout men, solicitous of the mitzvah, men who had made themselves impure in the service of others and were asking whether their devotion disqualified them from the central act of liberation. Moses told them to stand and wait while he consulted God. From this exchange came the law of Pesach Sheni, the second Passover, the rule that a person who could not observe the first can observe it a month later. An entire layer of Jewish law emerged from the question asked by men who had been carrying a coffin or tending a body when the deadline arrived.

Joseph's bones traveled with the Israelites through the entire forty years in the wilderness. The tradition imagines the Ark of the Covenant and Joseph's coffin traveling together through the desert, the living law and the dead patriarch moving in parallel through the same terrain. Those who saw both asked: what is this coffin doing beside the Ark? And the answer given was that the man in the coffin had kept everything written in the Ark, every one of the commandments, in his life. His bones had earned the place.

The midrashic tradition preserved in Sifrei Bamidbar records a dispute about who the men actually were who came before Moses on Passover eve in the wilderness, unclean and unable to offer the Pesach sacrifice. Rabbi Yishmael said they had been carrying Joseph's coffin. They had incurred ritual impurity in the service of honoring the dead patriarch, and now that impurity was preventing them from participating in the central rite of liberation. Rabbi Akiva proposed they were men made impure by the bodies of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron's sons who had died before the altar at the Tabernacle's dedication. Rabbi Yitzchak said they were men who had become impure through contact with an abandoned body, a person no one else was available to bury, the highest act of kindness in Jewish law because it could never be repaid.

All three opinions shared an underlying logic: these were men who had made themselves impure in service of others. Their question to Moses, whether they could observe Passover despite their impurity, was not an argument for exemption. It was a request for inclusion. They had not avoided the impurity. They had embraced it, for someone else's sake, and now they wanted to know if the law had room for people who gave everything for others and arrived at the deadline already spent.

Moses consulted God, and from that consultation came the law of Pesach Sheni, the second Passover, the rule that a person prevented from observing the first may observe it one month later. An entire legal category emerged from men who may have been carrying Joseph's coffin when the deadline arrived. Joseph, who had arranged his own funeral procession three centuries before the Exodus, may have inadvertently given the law one of its most generous provisions.

Joseph had arranged the formation himself, placing Levi beside the Ark in anticipation, placing himself as the one who would not carry but be carried. He was not just an administrator of grain stores. He was a man who had thought about the shape of the future until the shape became clear, and then had arranged himself to fit inside it.