Upon entering the Holy Land, the very first thing they did was bury Joseph's bones in Shechem. Why Shechem, of all places? Well, the Talmud tells us that God Himself instructed the tribes, saying, "From Shechem did ye steal him, and unto Shechem, shall ye return him." (As recounted in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews). There's a powerful sense of justice, of righting a wrong, woven into the very fabric of their arrival.
And that little detail speaks volumes, doesn't it? It suggests a cosmic accounting, a divine concern not just for the living, but even for the remains of the righteous.
Think about that for a moment. God, according to tradition, isn't just concerned with our earthly existence. The Zohar, that foundational text of Jewish mysticism, tells us that God is even more solicitous about the souls of the pious. These souls, it says, stand before Him "like angels," constantly serving and ministering. It paints a picture of a vibrant afterlife, intimately connected to the divine.
What about the next generation? Did the values and faith of Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham continue to flourish?
Absolutely. Jacob, we're told, raised all his sons in the fear of God, teaching them the path of piety. He wasn't afraid to be firm, to use "severity" when needed to truly drive his lessons home. According to Legends of the Jews, his efforts bore fruit: all his sons became godly men, their characters beyond reproach.
And their children, the ancestors of the twelve tribes? They mirrored their fathers’ piety. Their actions were no less significant than those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were, in essence, worthy of being called the Fathers of Israel themselves.
The Legends of the Jews recounts that God made a covenant with them, just as He had with the original three Patriarchs. And it's this covenant, this unbroken chain of faith and commitment, that their descendants, us, owe our very preservation to. A chain stretching back millennia, linking us to those first moments in the Promised Land, to the very bones of Joseph being laid to rest. It's a powerful reminder that our story is part of something much, much larger than ourselves.
Something to ponder, isn't it?