Genesis 50:14: The last movement in Genesis, and it is in the wrong direction

"After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt with his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father." This is the last journey in the book, and everybody in it walks away from the promise. They have just stood in the land Abraham was called to, at the one piece of it the family legally owns, and then they turn round and go back to the delta, because that is where the food and the office and the children and the herds are. Genesis ends with the covenant family outside the covenant country, and it does not pretend otherwise. The brothers use the road home to panic. Now that their father is dead they decide Joseph has only been waiting for him to die, and they send a message ahead claiming Jacob left instructions to forgive them — which may be true and reads like something invented in a hurry — and then arrive and throw themselves down and offer to be his slaves. It is the fifth time they have bowed to him. Joseph weeps when the message reaches him, and says the sentence the whole book has been assembling: as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. He lives to a hundred and ten and sees his great-grandchildren, and the last thing he does is make the same demand his father made. God will visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here. They embalm him and put him in a coffin in Egypt, and the coffin waits four hundred years. Moses carries it out at the Exodus; Joshua buries it at Shechem, in the plot of ground Jacob bought — the town Joseph was sent to as a boy and did not find his brothers in. So the map draws one more line south, in the procession's violet running into Egypt's red, and no page follows it. The walk that began with a stone at Bethel ends in a coffin in the delta, pointing home.