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Back to Question of the Week Q: Dear Rabbi, I have a few questions from [parshat Vayechi]. Was Joseph embalmed because they followed the practices of the country they were living in at the time? Or was it because the Torah hadn't been given yet and such practices were not yet discussed? Thanks. -Rachel |
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A: Dear Rachel: The question you raise provides a great example of how different assumptions about Judaism will lead to very different interpretations of seemingly simple texts. You are right in pointing out that the very last sentence of Genesis tells us that Yosef [Joseph] was embalmed: So Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt. (Genesis 50:26) Now, you could point out that Yosef was the Prime Minister of Egypt, and since he was a high Egyptian citizen, his poor and marginalized siblings didn't have an opportunity to bury him as they would have liked. He was embalmed and buried as an Egyptian official by other Egyptian officials, and that was the end of it. However, the real problem in chapter 50 is not the embalming of Yosef, but of Yaakov, his father: Then Joseph directed the physicians in his service to embalm his father Israel. So the physicians embalmed him. taking a full forty days, for that was the time required for embalming. And the Egyptians mourned for him seventy days. (verses 3-4, New International Version) Now we have a problem, depending on what we believe about the origins of the Torah. If we hold by the traditional Jewish belief that all the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis kept the Torah- even though it wasn't given till hundreds of years later, by the Torah's own report!- then we have to ask why Yosef gave the order for his father to be embalmed. Furthermore, the Torah does not explicitly prohibit embalming as such; rather, this prohibition is learned indirectly, from a passage in Deuteronomy 21 concerning the immediate burial of an executed criminal, and from Genesis 3:19, where we are told "to dust you shall return." Thus, you'd have to stretch a bit to say that Yosef was keeping this as later Jews did, or for the same reasons. For example, the mystical commentator called the Ohr HaChaim implies that Yosef would not have given orders to follow an Egyptian religious practice, except he was concerned that Yaakov would be revered as a deity by the Egyptians when they saw that his body would be miraculously preserved without embalming ! On the other hand, Rashi says merely that embalming was a matter of mixing spices, and that the process took forty days. Nahum Sarna, in the Jewish Publication Society commentary, says that Yosef was concerned about the long trip back to the land of Israel- he had Yaakov embalmed out of concern that his body should make it to his chosen resting place in the cave of Machepelah. (Cf. verses 12-14.) He points to the fact that Yosef had Yaakov embalmed by physicians, not priests, as evidence that this was not a ritual or religious embalming. On the other hand, I personally don't have any problem with the idea that the Genesis stories reflect an early stage of our people, before the central themes and laws of the Torah had developed in the way we know them today. It seems plausible to me that Yosef was simply following local custom- really, the only one he knew- and was honouring his father the best way he knew how, by giving him the "royal treatment," as it were, after death. This is not unlike many Jews today who purchase expensive, fancy caskets for their loved ones, unaware that Jewish law and custom would strongly mandate a plain, inexpensive wooden box. They think they are doing the "right thing," and it really doesn't have anything to do with accepting or rejecting Judaism, as such. To me, the simplest explanation is that Yosef was unaware of the written Torah, which developed later in Jewish history, and he was trying his best to show honour to his father by following both local custom and his father's wish to be buried far away. NJL |
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