🌱WEB · Genesis 50:10
What does Genesis 50:10 mean?
"They came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, and there they lamented with a very great and severe lamentation. He mourned for his father seven days."
— Genesis 50:10 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Joseph went up to bury his father; and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, all the elders of the land of Egypt,
All the house of Joseph, his brothers, and his father’s house. Only their little ones, their flocks, and their herds, they left in the land of Goshen.
There went up with him both chariots and horsemen. It was a very great company.
They came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, and there they lamented with a very great and severe lamentation. He mourned for his father seven days.
When the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, “This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians.” Therefore its name was called Abel Mizraim, which is beyond the Jordan.
His sons did to him just as he commanded them,
for his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the field, as a possession for a burial site, from Ephron the Hittite, near Mamre.
Explanation
Genesis 50:10 describes a scene near the end of the patriarchal narratives: Joseph and a large company of Egyptians and family members are transporting the embalmed body of his father Jacob (Israel) from Egypt to Canaan for burial in the family tomb at Machpelah. Along the way, they stop at a place called the threshing floor of Atad, located near the Jordan River, and there they hold an intense, public period of mourning. The verse tells us that Joseph observed seven days of formal lamentation for his father at this location before continuing on to complete the burial.
To understand the context, recall that Jacob had lived his final seventeen years in Egypt with Joseph, after Joseph had risen to become second-in-command under Pharaoh. Before he died, Jacob made Joseph swear to bury him not in Egypt but in Canaan, in the cave of Machpelah where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, and Leah were already buried (Genesis 49:29-32). This was a matter of covenant faithfulness — Jacob wanted his burial to testify to God's promise that Canaan, not Egypt, was the land given to his descendants. After Jacob's death, Joseph had the Egyptian physicians embalm his father's body (Genesis 50:1-3), and then, with Pharaoh's permission, led a massive
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