Genesis 50

1Joseph flung himself down on his father’s face, kissing him and weeping over him. 2Joseph instructed the physicians who served him to embalm his father, and so the physicians embalmed Israel. 3Forty days were needed for this, since embalming takes that long, and the Egyptians wept for him seventy days. 4Once the days of weeping for him had passed, Joseph addressed the household of Pharaoh: “If you look on me with favor, please speak for me in Pharaoh’s hearing and tell him: 5‘My father bound me by an oath, saying, “I am about to die. Bury me in the grave I prepared for myself in the land of Canaan.” So now, please let me travel up there to bury my father; afterward I will return.’” 6“Go up and bury your father,” Pharaoh replied, “as you swore to him you would.” 7Joseph went up to bury his father, and with him went all Pharaoh’s officials, the senior men of his household and every leading man in Egypt, 8and also Joseph’s whole household, his brothers, and the household of his father. They left nothing in the land of Goshen but their little ones, their flocks and their herds. 9Chariots and riders went up with him as well, so that the camp was very large indeed. 10They came to Atad’s threshing floor, beyond the Jordan, and there they wailed long and bitterly; Joseph held seven days of mourning for his father. 11The people of the land, the Canaanites, watched the mourning at Atad’s threshing floor and said, “How bitterly the Egyptians are mourning!” So the place was given the name Abel-mizraim; it lies beyond the Jordan. 12So Jacob’s sons carried out for him exactly what he had instructed them. 13They bore him to the land of Canaan and laid him in the cave of the Machpelah field, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham had purchased from Ephron the Hittite to own as a burial site. 14Once his father was buried, Joseph returned to Egypt, he and his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father. 15With their father dead, Joseph’s brothers began to worry. “Joseph may be nursing a grudge against us,” they said, “and he may pay us back in full for all the harm we did him.” 16So they had someone take a message to Joseph: “Your father, before he died, gave this order: 17‘Say this to Joseph: “I beg you, forgive your brothers’ crime and their sin, the wrong they did to you.”’ So now, please forgive the crime of the servants of your father’s God.” At their words Joseph wept. 18His brothers then came themselves and fell down before him, saying, “Here we are, your slaves.” 19Joseph answered them, “Have no fear. Do I stand in the place of God? 20Evil was what you planned against me; good was what God planned by it, so as to bring about what you see today: the lives of a great many people saved. 21So there is no need to fear. I will see that you and your little ones have what you need.” He comforted them, speaking kindly to them. 22Joseph went on living in Egypt together with his father’s household, and he reached the age of 110. 23Joseph saw Ephraim’s descendants to the third generation; the children of Machir, Manasseh’s son, were also received on Joseph’s knees at their birth. 24Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will not fail to come and help you; he will lead you up out of this land to the land he swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.” 25Joseph then put the sons of Israel under oath: “God will not fail to come and help you, and when he does, you are to take my bones up with you from here.” 26Joseph died at 110 years of age. He was embalmed and put in a coffin in Egypt.