Joseph's Fragrance Led Moses to His Coffin in the Nile

The night the Israelites walked out of Egypt, millions of people were moving at once. Women carried kneading bowls on their shoulders. Children clung to the hems of robes. Flocks of sheep and goats were being driven down every road. The Torah gives the crowd its grand scene. A mixed multitude. Unleavened bread. The cry of the firstborn rising from every Egyptian house before dawn. The whole nation walks out of four hundred years of slavery in a single sentence.

In the middle of that sentence, one man is not walking with the crowd. Moses is in the water of the Nile, chest deep, alone in the dark, holding something in his arms.

The story of why starts four hundred years earlier, with the death of Joseph. Joseph, second only to Pharaoh, grew old in Egypt. Before he died, he gathered his brothers and made them swear an oath. "God will surely visit you," he said, "and you shall carry up my bones from here" (Genesis 50:25). Then they embalmed him and laid him in a coffin in Egypt (Genesis 50:26). The Torah closes the book of Genesis on that image. A coffin. A promise. A stretch of years no one can see the end of.

The rabbis of late antiquity could not leave the coffin where Genesis had left it. They wanted to know what happened to it. Where had the Egyptians put it. Why had no one come to fetch it during the years of slavery. And how, on the night of the Exodus, did anyone even remember where to look.

The tradition preserved in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, and drawing from much older midrash and the Talmud tractate Sotah, offers an answer that is both strange and weirdly practical. The Egyptians, the rabbis said, had been terrified of losing Joseph. He had saved Egypt from famine. His presence in the ground was thought to keep the river flowing. So the Egyptians, after his burial in a proper coffin, had moved the coffin into the Nile itself. They had sunk it, weighted and sealed, into the great river that was the source of all Egyptian life. As long as Joseph lay in the water, the magicians said, the water would never fail them.

For four centuries, then, the coffin was underwater. No markers. No accessible spot on the bank. Nothing but silt and current and the secret of a river that had no intention of giving up its dead.

On the night of the Exodus, Moses left the camp. The Torah records only that he took the bones of Joseph with him (Exodus 13:19), and most readers assume he had simply been handed a box at some earlier moment. The rabbis knew better. The box had to be found first. And there was only one generation living who could possibly have known where it was, and they had been in slavery so long the knowledge had nearly evaporated.

The midrash says Moses went to an old woman named Serach, daughter of Asher. Serach was one of the few souls who had been alive in both generations. She had been a child in the time of Joseph. She had come down to Egypt with the family. She had survived, somehow, all the way through the slavery and was now impossibly old, the kind of old that shows up only in the rabbinic imagination. Moses asked her where Joseph's coffin was. Serach answered in three words. "In the river."

Which river. Where in the river. She did not say. She did not have to. Moses took a metal plate on which he had inscribed the name of God, or in some versions took a small fragment of a shard that contained the divine name, and he walked to the bank of the Nile. He called out. "Joseph," he said, "the time of the promise God swore to your fathers has come. If you will come up, good. And if not, we are released from the oath you made us swear."

The coffin came up.

That is one version. The other version is stranger and more beautiful, and it is the one Ginzberg preserves in the earliest tellings. Joseph's body, even in death, emitted a fragrance. The rabbis had a tradition that when the Ishmaelite traders bought the living Joseph from his brothers, they were normally carrying pitch and hides, goods that stank. On that one caravan they were carrying spices. A providential dispensation, the midrash says. So that sweet fragrance might be wafted to Joseph on the road to Egypt. Some rabbis said Joseph himself had a pleasant smell about him that lingered everywhere he walked, and that the princesses of the Egyptian court had been drawn to him by the fragrance alone.

That fragrance never went away. Not in life. Not in death. Not in four hundred years underwater.

Moses, according to the rabbis, went to the Nile on the night of the Exodus and walked along the bank sniffing the wind. The scent was faint but unmistakable. A trace of spice in a river that had nothing but reeds and mud. He followed it to the spot where the water ran over the coffin, waded in, and raised the box with his own hands. The fragrance of a man who had been dead since before any living Israelite was born was the compass that led Moses through the dark.

The Bavli Sotah, the Talmudic tractate on the suspected adulteress compiled in sixth-century Babylonia, preserves a related teaching from Rabbi Nathan. It says that when Moses stood on the bank calling out to Joseph, the coffin rose to the surface on its own, as if Joseph had been waiting for the sentence. Every Jewish soul in Egypt was walking out of slavery. The bones of the one who had gone down to Egypt first needed to walk out last.

The tradition says Moses then carried the coffin himself, on his own shoulders, through forty years of wilderness. Every time the camp moved, Moses carried it. Every time the pillar of cloud shifted, Joseph went with him. At the Red Sea, some midrashim say, two coffins traveled together. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the Tablets of the Law, and the coffin of Joseph, containing the bones of the man who had made the whole family swear an oath. "Keeper of the covenant" and "keeper of the oath," the rabbis said, walking side by side through the split sea.

Centuries later, in the Book of Joshua, the bones are buried in Shechem (Joshua 24:32), the city where Joseph had been sold into slavery as a boy. The circle closes. The promise Joseph had made his brothers swear was kept by a stranger from the desert who followed his scent through a river, and the coffin that had been sunk in the Nile by men who thought they were pinning the source of their own prosperity was lifted by the one Hebrew in Egypt who was brave enough to call out to the dead and wait for an answer.

Joseph answered. The rabbis swear that he did.