Genesis 50:10: Seven days of Egyptian mourning on the wrong side of the river

"When they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they lamented there with a very great and grievous lamentation, and he made a mourning for his father seven days." A threshing floor is the flattest, hardest, most public ground a village owns — a bare circle of rock or beaten earth up where the wind can take the chaff. It is where Boaz sleeps, where David buys the site of the temple, where kings sit to hear prophets. It is not a cemetery. It is the one place near a settlement big enough to hold a crowd, and this crowd needs holding: the government of Egypt, stopped in open country, wailing for seven days. The locals watch and draw their own conclusion. This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians, they say, and the name sticks — Abel-mizraim, the meadow or the mourning of Egypt. Canaanite villagers give an Egyptian name to a piece of their own ground because of a week they once watched from a distance, and Genesis records it as the reason the place is called what it is called. Beyond the Jordan is the phrase that has kept scholars busy for two thousand years, because it normally means the east bank, and a funeral travelling from Egypt to Hebron has no business on the east bank at all. Either the party swung wide around the Dead Sea, as the Exodus generation later did, or the narrator is writing from a standpoint that makes "beyond" mean the west side, or the name attached itself to two places. Nobody has settled it. So the map gives Atad a ring and not a pin. The sources are firm that Atad and Abel-mizraim are the same place — five hundred votes, no dissent — and completely unfirm about where that place is: near the mouth of the Jordan, or Deir Hajla on the west bank, or Tall al-Ajjul down by Gaza. What is agreed is the identification. What is not agreed is the ground. The ring sits on the leading reading and claims nothing else, and the Jordan is on the frame because the verse uses it as a bearing.