Moses, Joseph's Coffin, and the Oath That Waited Four Centuries

The night Moses set out for Egypt, something tried to kill him on the road.

The Book of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and Exodus from around the second century BCE, names the attacker as Mastema, the Prince of Accusation, the angel assigned to prosecute human beings before the heavenly court. Mastema had been watching Moses. He had watched him leave Midian, heard God's voice at the burning bush, and understood what was about to happen. An Israelite was going back to Egypt. The empire was about to crack. Mastema moved to stop it before it began.

The Torah in (Exodus 4:24) mentions the attack with almost no explanation: a divine being sought to kill Moses on the road, and his wife Zipporah circumcised their son and the threat passed. Jubilees fills in what the Torah leaves blank. Mastema was trying to prevent the exodus itself, not merely trouble one man. When Zipporah completed the circumcision, the covenant-seal of Israel was literally on Moses's body, and Mastema had no more legal ground to stand on. He could not touch what had already been claimed.

Moses arrived in Egypt. The plagues began. Frogs and darkness and hail and death. Pharaoh relented, then refused, then relented again. And when it was finally time to leave, when the Israelites were pouring out of Egypt in a midnight exodus, everyone else was gathering gold.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, drawing on Talmudic and Midrashic sources from across the rabbinic world, records that while the Israelites stripped Egypt of silver and gold, Moses was alone at the Nile, searching for a coffin. He searched for three days and three nights. The coffin of Joseph had been sunk in the river by the Egyptians generations earlier, some versions say deliberately, to keep Joseph's bones in Egypt forever, to prevent exactly what Moses was now trying to accomplish. Egypt had needed Joseph alive. Egypt's strategy, now that he was dead, was to keep him.

The oath that bound Moses went back four centuries. Before Joseph died, he made his brothers swear: when God brings you out of this land, take my bones with you (Genesis 50:25). The brothers swore. Then they died. Then their children died. Then their children's children. But the oath persisted, living on from generation to generation, waiting for someone to honor it. Moses understood that you cannot be liberated as a people while you remain in debt to a dead man's last wish. The freedom of Israel was tethered to a coffin at the bottom of the Nile, and Moses was the one who had to go get it.

The Talmud in Tractate Sotah preserves the detail that sealed the search: a very old woman named Serach bat Asher, who had been alive since the generation of Jacob himself, knew where the coffin had been sunk. She brought Moses to the place on the riverbank. He threw a shard of clay into the water and called out to Joseph: the time has come. The oath you made our fathers swear is due. Rise to us. And the coffin rose to the surface.

While Israel marched out laden with Egyptian wealth, Moses walked beside an ark of bones. The same Legends of the Jews notes the contrast explicitly, two arks traveled through the desert together for forty years, the ark of the living God and the ark of a dead patriarch, and neither was less important than the other. Joseph had earned that honor. He had saved Egypt during seven years of famine. He had saved his brothers who had sold him into slavery. He had spent years in a pit and a prison and never stopped being who he was. He deserved to go home.

Meanwhile, before any of this, before the plagues and the exodus and the three days of searching, Moses had spent forty years as a king he never intended to become. The Book of Jasher preserves a tradition that Moses reigned over the kingdom of Cush for forty years after being caught up in a succession crisis. He ruled justly. The people loved him. Then the queen pointed out that Moses had never embraced Cushite religion and had shown no interest in the culture's expectations. The people deposed him honorably, gave him gifts, and let him go. Moses arrived in Midian with forty years of kingship no one in Israel knew about.

The man who would lead the greatest migration in ancient Jewish history had already led a kingdom. He had already proved he could hold authority without corrupting it. He had already been the kind of king who could be deposed without violence because there was nothing to fight over, he had not taken anything that was not given to him freely. When Mastema tried to stop Moses on the road to Egypt, he was trying to stop someone who had been shaped by losses and exiles and unexpected roles for his entire adult life. Moses was ready. The coffin rose. The people went free.