Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJohn Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: April 1
Today is: Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 (Show Today's Devotion)
Select a Day for a Devotion in the Month of April: (Show All Months)
Genesis 50
In the first place, we learn that Joseph commanded “his servants the physicians to embalm his father.” In speaking of almost any other country, one physician would have been thought sufficient for even so great a man as Joseph; but this was peculiarly appropriate to Egypt. What Herodotus says of the healing art among the Egyptians, is here in point: “The medical practice among them is divided as follows each physician is for one kind of sickness, and no more; and all places are crowded with physicians; for there are physicians for the eye, physicians for the head, physicians for the teeth, physicians for the stomach and for internal disease.”
It ought not, therefore, to appear strange, that Joseph had a considerable number of family physicians. “Every great family, as well as every city, must, as Herodotus expresses it, have swarmed with the faculty. A multitude of these domestics would now appear an extravagant piece of state, even in a first minister. But then, we see, it could not be otherwise, when each distemper had its proper physician.” Note: Warburton’s Divine Legation, iv. 3, 83. The Egyptian physicians were renowned in ancient times. Cyrus had a physician sent to him from Egypt; and Darius Note: Herodotus, iii. 1, 129. always had Egyptian physicians with him.
Something of the kind seems to grow up in every highly advanced nation. We have ourselves oculists, aurists, dentists, etc.; and although the general body of physicians and surgeons profess to attend to all diseases, many of them rest their fame upon their peculiar study of particular classes of maladies.
The embalming is here performed by the servants of Joseph, the physicians. But, according to the accounts of classical authors, the embalmers were a hereditary and organized class of men in Egypt, in which different duties were assigned to different persons. If, however, a proper distinction of time be observed, there is here no contradiction. It is entirely natural to suppose, that the operation was performed by those to whom each one communicated it. But, afterwards, when the embalming was executed more according to the rules of art, a distinct class of operators gradually arose. Note: Hengstenberg, Egypt and the Books of Moses, p. 71.
The antiquity of the custom of embalming the dead in Egypt is well known. Mummies have been found with the names of the earliest Egyptian kings. Various reasons have been given for the practice. An eminent French physician, celebrated for the extent of his knowledge, and for the zeal with which he has often confronted death in the pursuit of science, Dr. Pariset, attributes the origin of embalming to the care in preventing the bodies of the dead from undergoing putrefaction, which, in a country like Egypt, would often give birth to the pestilence. To this he ascribes the absence, anciently, of the plague in Egypt, of which it has since become the head-quarters. But this seems to be a pure conjecture; and it has not the advantage of any support from facts. If the Egyptians did embalm the bodies of the human species, and of the animals accounted sacred, they buried the remains of others, and that, too, at such little depth below the surface, that in burying the carcasses of oxen, the horns were allowed to appear above ground. Note: Herodotus, ii. 41. The plague, the first appearance of which cannot be traced back further than to the fifth century before our era, then desolated all Egypt before it passed into Greece, although the practice of embalming was then in full activity. It is clear, also, that the ancients ascribe to this scourge no such origin; for Strabo speaks of the pestilential maladies of Egypt, as being caused by the exhalations from the marshes of the Delta.
It may also be pointed out, that the religious ideas attached to the preservation of the human body are by no means peculiar to the Egyptians. That which may be conceded to them is the practice of a more costly and elaborate embalmment than was known among other nations. There is, indeed, scarcely any part of the world in which traces of this usage have not been found. Note: See a curious collection of examples in Henry’s D Egypte Pharaonique, i. 328, 329. The mode adopted by the Egyptians in the preservation of the body, belongs to, and expresses the nature of the soil which they inhabited, and was different from that of the Ethiopians, from among whom it is now generally supposed that they came. The land produces no resinous trees; but natron is found in great abundance. This, therefore, was the material principally employed by them, in place of the vegetable resins in use among most other nations. This seems to have been alone practised during the earliest times; but the knowledge of foreign aromatics, introduced more lately a kind of luxury into the embalmments of the rich and great, while the bulk of the people were disposed of by the more simple process—the inequality of ranks being thus manifested even in the tomb.
It is stated in the text, that “forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those who are embalmed.” This is rather obscure; and we think that the Jewish translators of Genesis have understood it rightly by translating—“And they [that is, the physicians] finished it for him in forty days, for this completed the days of embalming.” The number of days here mentioned as required for embalming, agrees with some codices of Diodorus, though Herodotus speaks of seventy days as required for the more expensive and durable process of embalming. But this account has reference only to the method followed at Thebes, while the text speaks of that employed at Memphis; and modern research has demonstrated, that the mummies of Thebes greatly excel those of Memphis, and must therefore have required greater care and longer time in the preparation. It is moreover probable, that the corpse of the patriarch was simply so embalmed, as to stand the journey to Canaan, and did not pass through the process of making a mummy, as described by Herodotus; though that of Joseph himself, of whose embalmment we hear further on, doubtless was prepared in the most perfect manner then known.
The Egyptians mourned for the father of their vizier, during seventy days. This included, doubtless, the forty days of embalming. The family mourning continued until after the body had been deposited in the sepulcher; and at the place of sepulcher, the Egyptians joined in the grand and final act of lamentation. The classical writers give full details respecting the solemn mournings of the Egyptians for the dead, especially for those of high rank. The demonstrations of grief were of the most clamorous and violent kind; and the representations on the monuments confirm the information of the historians. “When a man died in a house, that is, if one of rank, all the females of his family, covering their faces with mud, and leaving the body in the house, ran through the streets, girded up, and striking their bare breasts, with loud lamentations. All their female relations joined them. The men beat their breasts in like manner, and girded up their dress.” Diodorus gives substantially the same account; but adds, that they went about the streets in this manner until the body was buried; that they abstained from all pleasant and ordinary food; and also neglected their persons, and appeared in sordid raiment. Many of these ceremonies of mourning have been inherited by the modern Egyptians.
The embalmment of the body prevented the need of haste in the actual interment. It was not, therefore, until the sixty days of general mourning had expired that Joseph applied for permission to carry the body of his father for burial to the land of Canaan, alleging that Jacob had, on his death-bed, made him swear to do so. The king in his answer, “Go up and bury thy father, as he hath made thee swear,” gives us reason to suspect that, but for this oath, he would have hesitated to allow Joseph to depart. On this the Jewish annotator, Dr. M.J. Raphall, remarks “Jacob’s foresight, prudence, and worldly wisdom, appear unimpaired, when he is at the brink of the grave. He knows that the jealousy with which foreigners are regarded in Egypt, is strongly against their quitting the country, after they have once been permitted to reside in it, and that communication with, or return to, Canaan might be considered particularly objectionable. He therefore exacts from Joseph an oath, which he knows the religious feelings and scruples of the Egyptians will not call upon him to violate. Thus Jacob not only secures his end, but Joseph stands exonerated from all blame, as the circumstance which compels him to solicit leave of absence is so solemn and so sacred, that it places him above all suspicion.”
This must have been a very grand funeral procession—and that for three hundred miles—such as the world has seldom seen. There were not only the family of Israel—and not only the officers of the court, “the servants of Pharaoh”—but “the elders of Egypt,” or the grandees of the empire. There were also chariots and horsemen, so that, with the attendants taken with them by so many high persons, the camp was very great, as the text itself states. The terms would seem to suggest that the party was strong in a military point of view. There is a tradition among the Jews that Joseph contemplated the possibility of an attack from the family of Esau, which also claimed the cave of Machpelah; and that it actually came to a battle between the two parties, in which Joseph was victorious. Even in the present age, so rich a caravan could not pass through those countries without an armed escort, sufficiently strong to protect it against the predatory attacks of the desert Arabs. The object of the sacred historian is, however, simply to indicate the grandeur and magnificence of Jacob’s obsequies, which, indeed, seem to be without a parallel in history.
“What hitherto has most affected me in the comparison,” says Parker, “was, indeed, the noble obsequies of Marcellus, as Virgil has described them. Note: Bibliotheca Biblica, i. 977. But how do even these, with all the parade of poetry about them, fall short of the plain and simple narrative before us! Let the Campius Martius be as honorable among the Romans as they please. Let the honors there paid to that heroic youth, whom Augustus had adopted for his heir, be tenfold superior to what at the best they were: What parallel can there be between the procession and magnificence of both? What are the six hundred beds, for which the Roman solemnities on this occasion were so famous, in comparison with that national itinerant multitude, which swelled like a flood and moved like a river—to all Pharaoh’s servants; to the elders of his house; and all the elders of the land of Egypt; all the house of Joseph and his brethren, and his father’s house, the chariots and horsemen, and the whole retinue, conducting their solemn sorrows for near three hundred miles into a distant country?”