Moses Stood at the Nile Calling Joseph's Name

The Oath That Waited Four Hundred Years

Joseph made his brothers swear before he died. He was still the viceroy of Egypt then, the man who had saved the region from famine, the second most powerful figure in the most powerful nation on earth. He could have demanded his bones be carried home to Canaan while he still lived. He had the authority for it. He chose instead to make a conditional request. When God visits you and brings you up out of this land, carry my bones up with you. The promise was generational. The brothers who swore it would be dead before it could be fulfilled, and their children, and their grandchildren, and generations beyond that. The oath would pass from parents to children across four hundred years, renewed in each generation, waiting for the visit Joseph had predicted.

When the Exodus came and the Israelites received permission to plunder Egypt, the nation moved through the city collecting silver and gold from Egyptian houses. Moses was not with them. He was at the river.

The Plate That Called the Bones

Moses had searched for three days and three nights and found nothing. Joseph's coffin had been sunk in the Nile by the Egyptians when it became clear that the Israelites intended to leave, under the theory that as long as Joseph's remains were in Egypt, the people who had sworn to carry them home would be bound to stay. The coffin was not visible. It was not findable by ordinary searching. Moses needed a different approach.

He took a piece of silver and engraved on it the image of the ox, the same image that had once been on the plate he used to call Joseph's bones up from the Nile in an earlier attempt. He stood at the river and said: Joseph, Joseph, the time has come of which you spoke. The Shekhinah is waiting for you. Israel is waiting for you. If you do not show yourself, we are released from the oath. The coffin rose to the surface. He pulled it out and carried it with him when the nation departed.

The Woman Who Remembered Everything

One person in Egypt knew where Joseph was buried and could have told Moses directly if anyone had thought to ask her. Serach was the daughter of Asher, Jacob's son. She had been alive when Joseph was still in Canaan. She had been alive when her great-uncle had been sold to the traders. She had been the one who told Jacob that Joseph was alive in Egypt, playing the news carefully on a harp so that the shock of the information would not kill the old man with his weak heart. Jacob had blessed her for it with a blessing that meant she would never die an ordinary death.

Serach had been alive through all four hundred years of Egyptian slavery. She knew the geography of every generation, remembered the oath from the time it was first sworn. When Moses finally found the right path to Joseph's coffin, the tradition acknowledges it was because the ancestral memory of what had been promised ran through people like Serach who had kept it alive. Some versions say she was the one who told Moses where to look. She entered paradise alive, the tradition records, the oldest living link in the chain of promise between Joseph and the Exodus.

The Coffin That Traveled With the Ark

For forty years in the wilderness, the coffin of Joseph traveled alongside the Ark of the Covenant. The two boxes moved together through the desert, the Ark bearing the divine law given at Sinai and the coffin bearing the bones of the patriarch who had made the original journey into Egypt and had insisted on the promise that the journey would end. Passersby would ask the Israelites what the two caskets were. The answer was that one contained the law of the living God and one contained the dead who had fulfilled the law of the living God. Joseph had kept every commandment before the commandments existed as a formal text. He had honored his father. He had refused adultery. He had done not steal when he easily could have.

God had promised him a reward in return. As you live, Joseph, for forty years they will carry you. For forty years Israel carried him through the wilderness that connected the place of his burial to the place of his origin. When the people finally entered Canaan, they buried his bones at Shechem, on the parcel of land Jacob had purchased from the sons of Hamor for a hundred coins of silver, the field that belonged to the sons of Joseph as a permanent inheritance. The coffin had arrived where the oath said it would arrive. The four centuries were over.