The Only Woman Alive Who Remembered Where Joseph Was Buried

Most people picture the night of the Exodus as a single scene. Torches. Hurried packing. Children on shoulders. Doors streaked with lamb's blood. A nation streaming out of Egypt in the dark with whatever they could carry. The rabbis saw the same night. Then they pointed at one figure standing completely alone, far from the crowd, ankle deep in the Nile, not looking for gold.

Moses was looking for a corpse.

The Torah mentions it almost as an aside, a single verse dropped into the exit scene like a footnote. "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had made the children of Israel swear, saying, God will surely remember you, and you shall carry up my bones from here with you" (Exodus 13:19). Three hundred years earlier, Joseph, dying in the palace of a pharaoh who still loved him, had made his brothers promise that when the God of Israel eventually came to rescue their descendants, nobody would leave Egypt without him. They promised. Then they died. Their children died. Their children's children died. Joseph's coffin disappeared into the bottom of a river. And the Torah tells you, in nine words of Hebrew, that Moses went and got it.

The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled in second-century Palestine from the school of Rabbi Ishmael, refuses to let that footnote stay a footnote. The midrash opens its comment with what sounds like a quiet drumroll. This apprises us of the wisdom and the saintliness of Moses. Everyone else in the camp that night was grabbing silver and gold off their former masters, walking out rich. Moses was working on a different mitzvah. While Israel plundered Egypt, Moses was keeping a three-hundred-year-old promise that had nothing to offer him in return. The Mekhilta quotes a line from Proverbs to crown him for it. The wise of heart will take commandments (Proverbs 10:8). Not gold. Commandments.

And then the Mekhilta asks the question nobody had bothered to ask out loud. How did Moses know where Joseph was buried?

The coffin had been missing for more than three centuries. Nobody alive had seen it. Nobody remembered what the Egyptians had done with it. The answer the Mekhilta gives is one of the strangest and most beautiful sentences in rabbinic literature, and it depends on a woman most readers have never heard of.

Her name is Serach bat Asher, the daughter of Jacob's son Asher. She is mentioned twice in the Torah, once in (Genesis 46:17) in the list of the seventy souls who came down to Egypt, and once in (Numbers 26:46) in the census of the wilderness, more than two centuries later, where she is still there, counted among the living. The rabbis noticed. Two census lists separated by hundreds of years and Serach is in both of them. The conclusion was unavoidable. Serach did not die. Serach was one of the few human beings in Jewish tradition granted effective immortality, and the Mekhilta says Moses went to her because she was the only person left in the world who remembered where Joseph had gone into the ground.

She took him to the riverbank. The Egyptians, she said, had made Joseph a metal casket and sunk it in the Nile. They did it on purpose. The magicians of Egypt, according to a later tradition recorded in Bavli Sotah 13a in the Babylonian Talmud redacted in the sixth century CE, had warned Pharaoh that Israel would never leave Egypt without Joseph's body. So the Egyptians had hidden the body where no one could ever find it. Sink the casket. Bury it under a river. A river never forgets to forget.

Moses stood at the Nile. And then he did something that is half funeral, half courtroom, half summons of the dead. He threw a stone into the water. And he shouted at the river. He shouted at the bottom of the river. He shouted at the dead man inside the box.

"Joseph. Joseph. The oath that the Holy One swore to our father Abraham, that He would redeem His children, has been fulfilled. Give honor to the Lord, the God of Israel, and do not delay our redemption, because it is on your account that we are delayed. If you reveal yourself, good. If not, we are absolved of your oath."

It is the only moment in the Torah where a living prophet argues with a corpse.

And the corpse hears him. The casket of Joseph rose to the surface of the Nile, floated, and Moses lifted it out. The river gave up what it had been hiding for three centuries because a man who had been raised in Pharaoh's palace stood on its bank and named Joseph twice and invoked the oath to Abraham. Louis Ginzberg, in his Legends of the Jews published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, collects a fuller version of the scene from later rabbinic sources (see the full Ginzberg collection in our database) and says the casket broke the surface slowly, without a splash, as if Joseph had been listening the whole time and was only waiting for the right summons.

Moses carried the coffin the entire length of the Exodus. Through the Red Sea. Through forty years in the wilderness. Into every battle, every census, every move of the camp. When Moses finally died on Mount Nebo and Israel crossed into the land of Canaan, the coffin was still with them, and Joseph was eventually buried in the plot of ground his father Jacob had bought at Shechem (Joshua 24:32). A promise kept by three generations.

The Mekhilta's quiet point is this. On the night everyone else was becoming rich, Moses was doing the work nobody else wanted to do, for a man nobody else could find, because a dying request in (Genesis 50:25) was still waiting for an answer. An entire nation was in a hurry to leave. Moses was the only one slow enough to remember.

Somewhere in the Nile, for three centuries, a coffin waited for someone to call its name.