Three Deathbed Wishes That Shaped Israel's Return

Most people picture the Exodus starting at the burning bush. The rabbis behind Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's 1909 synthesis of centuries of Jewish source material, picture it starting on three deathbeds.

The Father Who Refused Egyptian Soil

Jacob had seventeen good years in Egypt with Joseph. Then his body failed, and he called the one son who could actually do something about a burial. Not Reuben. Not Judah. Joseph, because Joseph held a vizier's seal.

"If I have found grace in thy sight," he said, "bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt."

Then he gave reasons. Ginzberg's telling piles them up like a man who knows he only gets one chance. He did not want vermin from Egyptian soil at his body. He did not want his descendants to mistake Egypt for a holy place because their father lay there. He did not want his grave turned into an idolaters' shrine. And he wanted to lie in the land God had promised him at Beth-el, so that on the day of resurrection he would not have to crawl underground from Egypt to Hebron while others rose where they already rested.

He asked three times. A man of Jacob's stature should not have had to ask once. But he was old, dependent, in someone else's country. Even a king depends on favors in a strange land.

The Oath Joseph Did Not Want To Swear

Joseph said yes. Jacob said swear it.

Joseph balked. "Thou treatest me like a slave." A son's word should be enough. But Jacob knew which promise was about to bend. Pharaoh would want the body. Pharaoh would want a Hebrew patriarch entombed in a royal sepulcher as an ornament of the kingdom, and a son with a vizier's loyalty could find that hard to refuse.

So Jacob made him swear by the sign of the covenant of Abraham, the flesh Joseph had been marked with at eight days old. That was the oath that would hold against a king. Joseph swore, and went further. He swore that when his own time came, he would ask his brothers to carry his bones out too. That promise gets paid centuries later, when Moses goes looking for a coffin in the dark.

Why Was Simon Furious That Judah Spared Joseph?

Jacob's deathbed was about the future. Simon's, in the Testament tradition Ginzberg preserves, was about the past he could not undo.

Simon called himself strong, fearless, hard-hearted. He named his sin out loud. Envy. Jealousy of Joseph, because their father loved Joseph more, and the jealousy was so total that Simon had decided Joseph needed to die.

What broke him was not Joseph's death. It was that Joseph lived. While Simon was up at Shechem, Judah sold the boy to Ishmaelite traders. Reuben, who had planned to rescue him, came back to an empty pit and tore his clothes. Simon came back enraged. Not at the sale. At the fact that Judah had let Joseph live.

That fury sat in him for five months. God burned it out by withering his right hand for seven days. Simon spent two years afterward fasting and praying until the spirit of envy loosened. When Joseph later bound him as a spy in Egypt, Simon accepted the chains as the bill coming due.

His final words to his sons were stripped down. Love one another. Take the spirit of jealousy out from among you. He died at one hundred and twenty, and his sons smuggled his body to Hebron in a coffin of imperishable wood during a war between Egypt and Canaan. Jacob's burial demand had become the family rule.

The Donkey That Carried the Redeemer

Generations pass. Moses is in Midian. God speaks at the bush. Then the road back gets strange. Moses gets his father-in-law Jethro's blessing, loads his wife Zipporah and his sons onto a donkey, and rides toward Egypt. The donkey, the rabbis insist, is the same one Abraham saddled to carry Isaac to Moriah, and the same one the Messiah will one day ride. The animal under Moses is older than the empire he is going to challenge.

On the road, the angels Af and Hemah (Wrath and Fury) swallow Moses up to his feet because his son Gershom has not been circumcised. Jethro had made him promise the firstborn would be raised as a Gentile. Zipporah, fast as a bird, takes a flint, cuts, and touches the blood to Moses's feet. The angels release him. Moses, recovered, kills Hemah outright. The family of an unfinished covenant could not walk into a redemption story unfinished.

The Secret Sign Passed Down Through Daughters

Aaron heard the same divine voice in Egypt that Moses heard in Midian. The brothers met in the wilderness and embraced without envy. Aaron was glad God chose Moses. Moses was glad Aaron would be high priest. For this, the rabbis say, Aaron earned the right to wear the Urim and Thummim on his chest. The heart that rejoiced at a brother's exaltation was the heart fit to carry oracles.

The elders of Israel did not believe Moses because of his miracles. They believed him because of a phrase. "I have surely visited you" (Exodus 3:16). Jacob had whispered that sign to Joseph. Joseph had passed it to his brothers. The last surviving brother, Asher, gave it to his daughter Serah, who was still alive when Moses came back. The elders walked to Serah and asked her if the words matched. She said yes. The redemption could begin.

What the Brothers Finally Carried

So Israel left Egypt carrying three things. A father's oath that patriarchs would lie in their own land. A brother's confession that envy had nearly ended the family. And a sentence handed down through a great-granddaughter who outlived empires.

Three deathbeds. One people. And a coffin Joseph had asked them to carry, waiting in the dark for Moses to find it.