When the Canaanite natives saw the Egyptian-Israelite procession mourning at the threshing floor of Atad, they did something startling. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records it. "They loosed the girdles of their loins in honour of Jakob, and spread forth their hands, and said, This is a mighty mourning of the Mizraee. Therefore he called the name of the place Abel Mizraim" (Genesis 50:11).
Loosing the belt was a Near Eastern gesture of ritual respect — a sign that one was in the presence of the holy or the grieving. The Canaanites did not know Jacob personally. They knew only that Egypt's entire elite had stopped in their fields to weep. That was enough to make them untie the belts of their workday clothes.
The place-name the Targum preserves is a pun. Abel Mizraim can mean "meadow of Egypt" or "mourning of Egypt" — the Hebrew word avel for mourner and avel for meadow sharing the same consonants. The Canaanites who named the place honored a truth they had witnessed: foreign nobles were crying for a man who was not even their king. Something sacred had passed through. Jewish tradition remembers that moment as proof of Jacob's standing — when even the goyim of the land of Canaan paused their work to mark his passing.