Joseph Was Stolen From Shechem and Returned to Shechem

When the Israelites finally arrived in Canaan after forty years in the wilderness, they buried Joseph's bones in Shechem. The Torah records this fact in the last chapter of Joshua, almost as a coda to the long account of the land's division. The rabbis of the midrashic tradition heard in that single verse a principle of divine justice so precise and complete that it deserved its own explanation.

God spoke to the tribes, the tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews records: From Shechem did ye steal him, and unto Shechem shall ye return him.

This is a sentence of extraordinary compression. It names the crime and the repair in the same breath, with the symmetry of a verdict that has been considered for a very long time. Joseph's brothers had driven their father's flocks to Shechem, that city where the family had grazing rights and complicated history. Jacob sent Joseph to check on them. The brothers saw him coming from a distance, recognized the coat of many colors, and began to plot. It was in the fields outside Shechem that they stripped him and threw him into the pit. It was from that region that the Midianite traders carried him south toward Egypt. The place of the theft and the place of the burial are the same. God is exacting about this kind of symmetry.

The tradition goes further than the elegant symmetry, though, and draws a larger lesson about why God is so careful about the bodies of the righteous. The source text from Ginzberg's compilation, following the burial at Shechem, records this: God, who is so solicitous about the dead bodies of the pious, is even more solicitous about their souls, which stand before Him like angels and do their service ministering to Him. The bones matter because the person mattered, and the person still stands in the presence of God. The physical fact of burial in the right place is a declaration that the whole person is accounted for, soul and body, before God and in the land of the covenant.

This is why Moses personally retrieved Joseph's coffin before the Exodus began. The traditions around this act, drawn from the mekhilta and from broader midrashic sources, are elaborate. The Egyptians had placed the coffin in the Nile, understanding that Israel would not leave without it, hoping the weight of Joseph's remains would anchor the entire people to Egypt permanently. Moses stood at the river and called out to the dead: Joseph, the time has come. The Shekinah is waiting. Israel is waiting. Arise. The coffin rose to the surface.

Moses then carried Joseph's coffin through forty years of desert alongside the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark contained the Torah, the word of God. The coffin contained the bones of the man who had made it possible for Israel to survive long enough to receive the Torah. They traveled together through the wilderness as a matched pair, one the promise and the other the proof that promises are kept. The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus, preserves the tradition that when the Israelites saw the two carried side by side, they marveled, and Moses explained: the one fulfilled the commandments that are written in the other.

The Testament of Benjamin, preserved in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a collection of apocryphal texts from the Second Temple period, records that Benjamin made the same final request as Joseph on his own deathbed. He commanded his children to carry his bones up from Egypt and bury him near his fathers. Joseph had set the pattern and Benjamin followed it, and after them the tradition says that Moses carried the bones of the other patriarchs as well, Zilpah and Bilhah among them, the handmaids whose descendants had become tribes and whose bodies had lain in Egypt until the liberation came.

The midrashic tradition closes the account of Joseph's burial with a declaration that reaches beyond any single story. The ancestors of the twelve tribes were no less pious than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God made a covenant with them as He had made with the three Patriarchs, and to this covenant their descendants owe their preservation. The twelve sons of Jacob, flawed and divided as they were, had been enough. Their bones in the land ratified the covenant in the same way that Abraham's burial of Sarah in Machpelah had ratified it: by insisting that the dead belong in the land, that the land owes the dead, that no exile is permanent enough to change where you are ultimately from.

From Shechem, Joseph was taken. To Shechem, he came back. The roundtrip took four centuries. God remembered exactly where the theft had occurred. The rabbis believed this meant God remembers all of them, every theft, every exile, every displacement, and they believed that the precision of Joseph's burial was evidence that the accounting is always being kept, the ledger always open, the return route already being calculated on the day of the taking.