Serach Bat Asher Showed Moses the Coffin Sunk in the Nile

The night smelled of smoke and crushed herbs, and the whole camp was loud with leaving. Children rode on shoulders. Men staggered under sacks that clinked with Egyptian silver. Doorposts behind them were still streaked dark where the blood had dried. Every hand in the camp was full of plunder, every arm wrapped around treasure pried loose from masters who had finally let go.

One man carried nothing. Moses walked away from the silver, away from the noise, down toward the river. He was not looking for gold. He was looking for a dead man.

The Promise Three Hundred Years Old

Long before this night, when Joseph lay dying in the house of a pharaoh who had loved him, he had gathered his brothers and bound them with an oath. When God remembered this people, when the day of leaving came, no one was to walk out of Egypt without him. "And ye shall carry up my bones from hence" (Genesis 50:25), he had said. They swore it. Then they died, and their sons died, and their sons' sons died, and the oath passed down hand to hand like a coal that must not go out.

Moses had not forgotten. The Torah folds it into the rush of departure as if in passing: "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him" (Exodus 13:19). Behind those few words was a man walking the wrong direction on the most important night of his life, while everyone else filled their arms. He knew the wisdom in choosing a mitzvah, a sacred duty, over a fortune. Therefore he went toward the water, empty-handed, to keep a word given three centuries before he was born.

The Coffin No One Could Find

There was a problem the silver-gatherers never had to face. Moses did not know where Joseph was buried. The Egyptians had seen to that.

They had not laid Joseph in a tomb where mourners might come. They feared what a body like his could do, and they wanted it for themselves. So they had a casket forged of metal, sealed Joseph inside, and sunk it into the Nile, down beneath the current where no Israelite could reach it. They believed his merit would soak into the river and bless its waters, that the Nile itself would grow richer for cradling a righteous man at its bottom. The grave was the river, and the river kept its secret.

Three hundred years of mud and current had buried the place in memory. The men who had carried the coffin to the bank were dust. The pharaoh who ordered it was dust. The story of where, exactly, the metal box had gone under had thinned to nothing.

The One Who Was Still Alive

But one person remembered. Out of that whole vanished generation, the brothers and their wives and their children, a single soul had lived on. Serach, the daughter of Asher, had been a girl when Joseph was lowered into the Nile, and she was alive still on the night of leaving, having outlasted everyone who shared the burying.

Moses came to her. He asked the question no one else could answer. Where is Joseph buried?

She did not point vaguely. She knew the spot. "The Egyptians made a metal casket for him," she told him, "and they fixed it in the Nile. In that place they put him." She led him to the water and showed him where the secret had gone under, the knowledge of three centuries narrowing down to one old woman's certain hand pointing at a stretch of moving river.

Joseph, Joseph

Moses stood on the bank of the Nile. The river ran black in the torchlight, giving nothing back. Somewhere under that surface lay a sealed box of metal, and he had no rope long enough, no men to dive, no time. The camp was already moving. He had a word, and only a word.

He picked up a stone and threw it into the water, and he called out across the current. "Joseph. Joseph." His voice carried over the river. The hour has come, he cried. The oath the Holy One swore to our father Abraham, that He would redeem His children, has come true. The promise you made Israel swear is upon us now. Give honor to the Lord, the God of Israel, and do not hold back our redemption, for it is on your account that we are delayed. If you show yourself, good. If not, we are released from the oath, and we will go without you.

The water stirred. Out of the depth where it had lain for three hundred years, the casket rose. It broke the surface and floated up to him, and Moses reached down and took it in his arms.

Two Arks on the Road

So Joseph came up out of Egypt after all, exactly as he had asked. And the manner of his going was a strange and holy thing to see.

When old Jacob had been carried up to be buried, the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of the royal house had walked behind his coffin, a procession grand by every earthly measure. Joseph's casket traveled in stranger company. Through the wilderness it went beside the ark of the covenant itself, the ark that held the words spoken at Sinai, the words of the Living God. Two boxes moving down the same road, side by side, year after year.

Travelers who passed the column stopped and stared and asked what the two arks were. They were told the truth that sounds impossible. "One holds a dead man, the other holds the words of the Living God." How, the strangers pressed, can a corpse ride beside the ark of the Life of the Worlds? And the answer was the whole reason Moses had gone to the river. The one in this coffin kept every word written in the other. Joseph had lived the commandments in Egypt before they were ever spoken aloud on the mountain. He had earned the road beside them.