Joseph had experienced much pain in his life at the hands of other people: Abused by his family, unjustly convicted of rape and imprisoned, and forgotten by fair-weather friends. You’d think he’d become one of the most callous men in the bible; resolving never to let anyone get to him again. That’s the natural reaction to unjust suffering at the hands of others. But not Joseph. No one is said to have been more tender-hearted than he was. We read that Joseph wept often. But he never cried for himself. There’s no mention of tears when his brothers threw him in the pit. There’s no mention of tears when Potiphar’s wife accused him of rape, and he was convicted. There was no mention of tears when he was forgotten by fair-weather friends. Yet, the text tells us that he wept often. He wept when he recognized his brothers. He had to leave the room to contain himself. He wept when he saw his little brother Benjamin. He wept when he overheard his brothers’ regrets at sinning against him. He wept when he revealed himself to his brothers.
The last chapter of Genesis beings with Genesis 50:1, “Then Joseph fell on his father’s face and wept over him and kissed him. Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father.” Hughes writes, “How beautiful Joseph was. The only tears recorded in his life were not for himself but for the plight of his brothers and now the loss of his father. Surely his brothers wept too, but Joseph set the heart-example.”1
Embalming was associated with the religious cult of Osiris. According to Brayford mummification was performed “…Because devotees expected an afterlife, the physical preservation of the body was necessary.” But she then explains, “The writer of the Hebrew text, however, dissociated the act from its original religious significance. Instead, embalming was performed on Jacob and Joseph because both would be buried far away and many weeks or years after their deaths.”2 The Priests of Osiris did the embalming in Egypt normally. But Joseph had his own physicians do it. Vos observes, “Physicians were equally capable of performing the task and perhaps they would have employed less of the pagan religious ritual than members of the embalmers’ guild would have.”3 Joseph kept his promise to bury his father in the cave at Machpelah where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Leah were buried. Rachel, the mother of Joseph and the “beloved” one of Jacob was not buried in Machpelah. Although Jacob wrestled with God over the affairs in his life, he clung to God’s promises concerning the land. Being joined with his ancestors there assured a foothold on the land promised as an eternal possession. Ryan Cook, a professor at Moody, closed his devotion on this passage this way: “This scene is a dramatic reminder that God is keeping His promises. It also demonstrates that for all his faults, Jacob believed and acted on those promises, ensuring Israel’s future in the land.”
1 R. Kent Hughes, Genesis: Beginning and Blessing, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004), 565.
2 Susan A. Brayford, Genesis: Commentary, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Richard S. Hess, and John Jarick, Septuagint Commentary Series (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007), 448–449.
3 Howard F. Vos, Genesis, Everyman’s Bible Commentary (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1982), 194.