Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records a small, telling detail about the funeral caravan. "And all the men of Joseph's house, and his brethren, and his father's household: only their children, and their sheep and oxen, left they in the land of Goshen" (Genesis 50:8).
Everyone else went. The children stayed. The flocks stayed.
The Aramaic is preserving a practical wisdom about mourning rites. A funeral procession from Egypt to Hebron was a long, difficult journey — weeks of travel, tribal warfare risks, desert conditions. Small children could not make the trek. Flocks could not be driven at that pace without being lost. So the adult Israelites entrusted their children and livestock to the safety of Goshen, knowing they would return.
There is also a quiet covenantal point. By leaving the children behind, the family was promising itself that it would come back. The Israelites were not abandoning Egypt to return to Canaan permanently — that would come in Moses's time, centuries later. They were going up only to fulfill Jacob's final oath, and then coming home to their Egyptian town. The Targum captures a family in a transitional moment: mourning a father, still rooted in exile, not yet ready for exodus. The children waiting in Goshen would grow up, and their grandchildren would eventually leave for good.