And Pharaoh said to Joseph, "Arise, bury thy father, as thou hast cursed."

Joseph said to the nobles of Pharaoh, "Speak for me in the ears of Pharaoh." Since Joseph, at the end of the days of general mourning for Jacob, found it necessary for himself to continue mourning for his father until his burial in the land of Canaan, and walked uncombed, in sorrowful clothes, unwashed, etc., it seemed unseemly for him to appear in person to Pharaoh in such a state with a petition for permission to transfer the body of Jacob to Canaan, and as all relations with Pharaoh in general he conducted at that time through others, so also for this intercession he used intermediaries. In the same way, Pharaoh, through others, conveyed to Joseph his permission to transfer the body of Jacob to the land of Canaan for burial in the common family tomb, in which Jacob had dug up beforehand, and a room had been prepared for himself.

7. 8. And Joseph went up to bury his father. And all Pharaoh's servants, and the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, and all the house of Joseph, and his brethren, and all his father's house, and his kinswomen, joined with him. And he left the sheep and oxen in the land of Goshen.

In the funeral procession with the body of Jacob, in addition to all the members of Joseph's family and his relatives, for the sake of honor, participated all the rabbis of Pharaoh, i.e., the court ranks, and the elders of his house, i.e., the heads of the court ranks, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, i.e., high persons as representatives of all Egyptian state and civil institutions. Since the purpose of the journey to the land of Canaan was solely the burial of the remains of Jacob, and not the settlement of Jacob's children and relatives in it, they did not consider it necessary to take livestock with them. Their young children also remained in Egypt, as it is said in the Hebrew text.

9. And the chariots and the cavalry were with him (Joseph), and the army was great.

Chariots and horsemen were needed not only to increase the solemnity of the procession, but also to cover the travelers from attacks in the Arabian desert, through which the path lay. From this, the funeral procession resembled the movement of a large militia.

10.   11. And he came to the threshing floor of Atad, where it was half the Jordan, and wept over it with great weeping and strong weeping: and thou shalt weep to thy father seven days. And when the inhabitants of the land of Canaan saw weeping on the threshing floor of Athad, they said, "This is a great lament of Egypt." For this reason the name of that place was called Lamentations of Egypt, if there is half of the Jordan on it.

The funeral movement did not take a direct route to Hebron through the land of the Philistines, but a more remote and roundabout one: it went through the Arabian desert to Idumea, from there, along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, it reached the eastern banks of the Jordan, and here it stopped at the threshing floor of Atad. In the direction of the funeral procession, it is impossible not to see a prophetic indication of the Israelites' path to Canaan after their exodus from Egypt, which took place more than 200 years later, for this path followed the same direction. On the threshing floor of Atad, all those who participated in the funeral procession remained for seven days, loudly mourning for Jacob. The custom of seven days of mourning for the dead, properly Jewish, was retained among the Jews in later times (1 Samuel 31:13, Sir 22:11).

12.13 And he did this to his sons (Israel) as they commanded them, and took his sons to the land of Canaan, and buried him in a cave where Abraham had acquired a cave for the sepulchre of Ephron the Hittite, right in Mamre.

Having paid the last funeral honors to Jacob on the border of the land of Canaan, together with the Egyptians, his sons crossed the Jordan and, having reached Hebron, laid the body of their father in the cave of Machpel, which Abraham had bought from a Canaanite for the purchase of a tomb, that is, in order to have a burial vault there. According to the translation from the Greek, this cave is called a special one, in the sense that it was either divided into two parts, one for the burial of males, the other for females, or it was represented by two compartments, the outer and the inner: the latter was among the first and was included in it. probably in order not to arouse in the natives distrust of their peacefulness and not to cause hostile clashes by their numbers and military situation.