The Bones of Joseph

The text we have today is an exciting and an important text, but it is often overlooked and seen as merely a transitional one. It does, however, tell us about two important facts. First, it tells us why God led them to their Promised Land by a slow and roundabout way, and delayed their entrance by a generation. Second, we are told that the mummified body of Joseph was carried with them, something Joseph himself had ordered centuries earlier.

The shortest way from Egypt to the Promised Land would have been around the northern area of Suez, then along the sea to Gaza. This would have meant however, an immediate confrontation with the war-like Philistines. Israel was not yet ready for such a head-on clash. In Isaiah 59:16, we are told that at another point in history, God in looking at Israel and the world, saw that there was no man, nor any intercessor. In the Berkeley version, that verse reads, “The Lord saw and it displeased Him that there was no justice.” He saw that there was no man. He was amazed to see that there was none to interpose. There was no man to interpose himself between the people and injustice. It was not enough that there was, in the case of Exodus 13, only Moses. Men were needed for the future, and so God prepared them with a generation in the Wilderness. The result was the training experience of the Wilderness years, to make men of the Hebrews. They had been slaves, now they were free men, or had to be free men.

Rabbi Hillel is said to have declared, “Where there is no man, try to be one.” Michael Walzer, a contemporary scholar, has noted that in some political thinking, such as in and I quote, “Calvinistic Christianity, that tyranny and license go together. The childish and irresponsible slave or subject is free in ways the republican citizen and Protestant saint can never be, and there is a kind of bondage in freedom. The bondage of law, obligation, and responsibility. True freedom in the rabbinic view lies in servitude to God. The Israelite had been Pharaoh’s slave. In the wilderness, they became God’s servants. The Hebrew word is the same, and once they agreed to God’s rule, he and Moses’ deputy force them to be free.” This is a very, very important point, especially for our time. Too often men stress freedom rather than responsibility. The demand for freedom, as such, is too often a desire for license. License in the sense of a supposed right to deviate from and show no respect for morality and God’s law. It is not freedom with justice that men really want when they talk about freedom.

The Hebrews, when they left Egypt, wanted neither slavery nor freedom. They longed for the security of slavery together with the license to go their own way. Newly created nation-states, such as we have seen in this century all over the world, or minority peoples or countries which gain independence have a usually very bad record for sometime. In dependence, freedom, does not confer responsibility and even the best of men must learn through many, many sorry misadventures, and many errors, the responsibility of true freedom.

On top of that, free people who lose their sense of responsibility, as in this country and all over the world, do not regain readily either responsibility or freedom. This is why God prepared them for a generation in the Wilderness.

Now the second aspect of our text is very closely related to this first one. The closing verses of Genesis, Genesis 50:24-26, tell us, “And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence. Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.” Joseph saw the future, not in terms of any possible prosperity in Egypt, but in terms of God’s purpose. In Joseph’s day, Israel flourished in Egypt. They had a good future there, apparently. But Joseph’s concern was with God’s ordained future. In Hebrew’s 11:22 we have a reference to Joseph’s faith: “By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones.” This requirement was fulfilled by Joshua.

After the conquest of Canaan we are told, in Joshua 24:32, “And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for an hundred pieces of silver: and it became the inheritance of the children of Joseph.” This purchase of the burying ground is cited in Genesis 3:19. The date of the purchase was perhaps 1739 B.C. The burial there of Joseph’s mummified body was about 1427 B.C., or about 312 years later. As Alan Cole observed, and I quote, “This was more than mere sentiment. This was a last exhibition of faith in the promises of God.” That tomb still exists as do other tombs of the patriarchs. It is ironic that, instead of seeing that as a very interesting bit of evidence, certain scholars feel that they should have the right to investigate them before passing a judgment, that is to excavate and examine the remains.

We are told also that, as the Hebrews left Egypt with the bones of Joseph, they went up harnessed. This means prepared for war, if need be. It means moving ahead in organized fashion. The root of the word translated as “harnessed,” implies ranks of fifties or lines of fives. In any case, Moses was not allowing a disorganized mob to surge forward. Although the line of march included livestock as well as women and children, and wagons, it was an orderly movement. This was a planned departure. From Joseph’s mummified body, to the movement of the tribes, all had been decided by Moses in advance, apparently. Moses had been promised deliverance by God, and he acted in terms of God’s word.

We are also told, as we have seen, that God led the people in a round about way lest peradventure they repent when they see war and they return to Egypt. There would be military opposition on their way. James Moffett translated the Hebrew word which the King James Version renders as “repent,” as “have regrets.” That is, lest they long for the security of slavery. It is an interesting fact that man’s hypocrisy is so very deep that, over the centuries, man has usually wanted slavery and yet talked hypocritically about wanting freedom. This is an aspect of man’s fallen nature. The English text tells us they went along the Red Sea, but that’s the modern name. In the text it reads, “The sea of reeds.”

In verse 18, we have a reference to the Wilderness. We have a problem in our time in reading the Bible because we visualize that part of the world in modern terms. We think of it as a dry and desert area. This was not true in antiquity. Indeed, much of it was forested. Much earlier, about Abraham’s time, the Arab peoples made money cutting down the forests and converting the lumber into charcoal and selling charcoal. They were in that business. In Solomon’s day, Lebanon was famous for its cedar forests. North Africa was once rich and fertile land with the area now called Te Sahara marked by streams and lakes. No doubt some of you have seen in documentaries or in the National Geographic at times, pictures of rocky walls in the Sahara that obviously once were lakeshore, and areas where people had drawn pictures of the some the animals; giraffes, crocodiles, water birds, and the like. It began to wane in its average rainfall about the time of Abraham, but by the time of the Romans, it was still while drier, very fertile. With the rise of Turkish power especially, the Near East and North Africa were radically deforested, and turned in many, many areas into desert lands.

The reference to the bones of Joseph is often passed by with little comment, but scripture gives attention to it in Genesis, in Exodus, in Joshua, and Hebrews. It has a two-fold purpose. First, Joseph expressed his faith in God’s promise that Canaan would be Israel’s land, God’s Promised Land. His requirement that he be buried there was an act of confident faith on Joseph’s part. At the time of his death, the Hebrews were free and prosperous in Egypt. This meant that the temptation to remain and to merge with the Egyptians could be great. By requiring that he be buried in Canaan at the time of Israel’s return, Joshua was affirming what Moses and Jesus were later to declare namely, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Then second, Joseph’s act and Moses’ faithfulness to it indicate the necessity for respect and honor towards our forbearers. The patriarchs honored their dead with their burial, and their descendants remembered their ancestors. Rootless people have no future. While having roots is no assurance of a good future, since it is not our past that blesses us but God, all the same, to despise or neglect the past is to act in terms of an unrealistic and ungodly independence. And the Bible speaks very strongly against that ungodly independence. The clearest and sharpest text is by Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:7, where he attacks man’s imagined freedom of God and man in these words, “For who maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didn’t not receive. Now if thou didst receive it why dost thou glory as if thou hast not received it?”

When we were in Bristol, England, Otto Scott told a group which expressed contempt for Britain’s imperial and colonial past, that God requires men to honor their father and their mother, to honor their past. Now to honor does not necessary mean to love, or agree with. It does mean, in the Hebrew, the word “honor,” weighty, heavy, a heritage from the past, to be carried as a part of life, a heritage that lays upon us burdens and responsibilities. To honor the bones of Joseph, to honor our father and mother means to assume the burden of history, our history, in order to move forward under God. The bones of Joseph are thus, very important. Where there is no honor for the past, there is no future. We then have the new barbarians, the rootless ones, people who destroy past, present, and future.

In this century, we have seen more destruction of the past perhaps than ever before in history. A higher percentage of mankind has been destroyed in the twentieth century by wars, mass murders, famines and the like, than ever before in history, and a vast portion of our inheritance from the past has been destroyed. The bones of Joseph are meaningless to our time. This is why some scholars, if they would be permitted by the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of that area, would dig up the bones of Abraham, and Isaac, Jacob, any of the patriarchal graves, and those of Joseph. We are living in a rootless time. And the bones of Joseph tell us that the past must be respected. It is our inheritance, and we must build on our inheritance, not destroy it. Let us pray.

Our Lord, and our God, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast made us heirs of the kingdom of God. Heirs of all the work of men, godly and ungodly, for all shall feed into thy kingdom. Make us mindful of our responsibility, that we may build in terms of our responsibility to the past, to the present, and to the future. That we may not be destroyers, but Nehemiah’s on the wall, rebuilding, in order that we might advance thy kingdom. Bless us to this purpose in Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Solzhenitsyn said to destroy a people you must first sever their roots.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And the manner in which our roots are being destroyed today is interesting, because there is an effort underway to rewrite history and to say that it was all a lie.

[Rushdoony] Yes. A columnist recently, who was not a conservative, called attention with shock to the radical ignorance of the past, even in its most elementary aspects that the younger generation is increasingly manifesting, and he realized suddenly, with horror, that we face, although he didn’t use the term, a generation of barbarians, of rootless ones. Unlike any previous generation. Yes?

[Audience] Well, history is a Christian subject.

[Rushdoony] Very good point. We have a few evidences of history here and there in pre-Christian times, but basically the history, it was not history but a chronicle of rulers who were, in many instances, regarded as gods, and even then, they were falsified. You never hear, for example, in the chronicles of the pre-Christian nations, of their defeats, or of humiliating aspects. The inscriptions, the chronicles record only their victories. We have to discover through various archeological studies, and the Bible, of their defeats. The Bible is the first history book. It records the facts about God’s patriarchs without any varnish. Their sins as well as their virtues, and the same is true of Israel. No nation has had its history ever depicted in such unflattering terms as the Bible depicts it. No other histories, even in our time, do that unless it is done with hostility, rather than with a desire to tell the wholeness of the truth about a people. So, you’re very right. History is a Christian subject and, as we have become paganized, history has disappeared in favor of social studies, just as geography has been merged into social studies. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that by thy word we do have a history, a history from the beginning that thou didst make. A history that point to thine ordained conclusion. Make us men of history, makers of history, mindful of our responsibility in Jesus Christ to be more than conquerors, to seek first thy kingdom and thy justice, in all things to carry out the requirements of thy command word. Bless us in our service. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Holy Spirit bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen. {30:26.0}

End of tape.