Genesis 50:7: A state funeral leaves Egypt for a cave in the hills

"So Joseph went up to bury his father. With him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt." He had to ask permission, and he could not ask it himself. Joseph is in mourning, which makes him ritually unfit to stand in front of Pharaoh, so he sends the request through the household: my father made me swear, saying, in my tomb that I hewed out for myself in the land of Canaan, there shall you bury me. Now therefore, let me please go up and bury my father. Then I will return. The last four words are the ones that get it granted. He is the man holding the granaries of a starving empire, and he is promising to come back. What leaves the delta is not a family party. Seventy days of official mourning have already been kept — two short of the full royal seventy-two — and the escort is the government of Egypt: the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, the elders of the land, chariots and horsemen, a very great company. The embalmers took forty days over the body. This is a head of state's funeral, laid on for a foreign shepherd, and the whole of it is because a dying man made his son put a hand under his thigh and swear not to bury him here. The children, the flocks and the herds stay in Goshen. That detail is not sentiment, it is surety: the pledge that a procession this size is going to Canaan to dig a grave and not to leave. The map draws the road out of Egypt in the country's own red, running north-east and ending open, because the verse says only that they went up. Where they stop is the next page, and it is not where anybody would expect.