Gathered to His People: Jacob's Request

A venerable old Church tradition for the burial of the dead holds that they should be buried in the churchyard.  This method of burial was an affirmation of hope in the resurrection of the dead.

In Genesis 49-50, Jacob makes Joseph swear to bury him near Abraham and Isaac, in the cave near Mamre in Canaan.  This request serves as the structural connection between the era of the patriarchs and the great deliverance in Exodus.

On one hand, the entire affair serves as a dramatic and ironic foreshadowing of the story to come.  Certain powerful continuities between the last chapters of Genesis and the early moments of Exodus are important; the Egyptians mourn for Jacob for 70 days (50:3), while in Exodus God makes the Egyptians favorably disposed towards Moses and Israel (Ex. 3:21).  Also, Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen (50:9 and Exod. 14:9) are present on both journeys.  These continuities create the ironies of Exodus and cast a dark shadow over the restorations between Joseph and his father and brothers.  The freedom with which Joseph and his brothers can simply journey to Canaan and bury Jacob increases the sense of tightness in the grip that refuses to let Jacob's children go.  And Genesis ends with a sense of deep foreboding, since it has already been promised (15:13) that there is a slavery yet to be endured.

On the other hand, however, Jacob's request shows that finally, after a lifetime of penitence, he has become a redeemed man.  The supposed death of Joseph had dislocated Jacob from the world to the extent that he could speak of his 130 years (!—47:9) to Pharaoh as days that were "few and evil" (מְעַ֣ט וְרָעִ֗ים).   Indeed, upon learning of Joseph's death, Jacob maintains that he will not be comforted until he joins Joseph "in the grave."  Having found Joseph, then, his request to be buried in Canaan is no small gesture.  Jacob has already shown his unwillingness to be parted from Rachel's children before, when the brothers try to take Benjamin to Joseph.  But his requirement that he be buried near Abraham and Isaac binds Jacob not to the purported and imagined life with Joseph but to the promise made to Abraham and Isaac, and hence, to the maker of that promise.  It binds Jacob to the promises of God, to the slavery and redemption, to the threads of the story that are yet dangling at the end of Genesis.  Jacob's request denies the facsimile of a home in the stability of Joseph's principality and casts his hope upon the faithful God of his fathers to turn the place of Abraham's wandering into a home for His people and His name.

And Jacob seems to expect some kind of bodily participation in that inheritance, even after his death.  Jacob may be saying more than he knows when he says "I am about to be gathered to my people."  And perhaps the best way to account for all of this is to say that "I am about to be gathered to my people" is the literal sense of a verse whose figural sense would translate as "expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi."  

Is this not what might be expected to follow from Jacob's intimacy with the God of the living?