Disproportionate Measure for Measure
With the last of the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh was forced to relent, and the Israelites left Egypt “with hand held high,” that is, full of confidence. Nevertheless, God did not lead them by the shortest route to Canaan, along the seacoast, lest the Israelites, untrained in war, end up having to fight the Philistines. Instead, He led the people the longer way around, via the Red Sea (more properly, the “Sea of Reeds”). Along the way, the Torah reports, “Moses took Joseph’s bones with him, since he [Joseph] had made the Israelites swear an oath, saying ‘When God takes notice of you, you will carry up my bones from here with you’” (Exod 13:19).
On closer inspection, this last sentence seemed to the Rabbis to contain an internal contradiction. It says that Moses took care of getting Joseph’s bones because Joseph had made the Israelites swear that they would do so. If everyone swore this oath, why did Moses alone go to get them? This wasn’t exactly a minor question. Oaths in ancient Israel were a serious business, and failure to carry one out was a major infraction. So why didn’t the people as a whole go to pick up Joseph’s last remains and thereby fulfill their oath?
Midrashic tradition offers not one answer, but three. The first is not very flattering to the Israelites. They had just come out of Egypt, where, according to the biblical account, they had “borrowed” valuable property from their Egyptian neighbors and then not returned it. Under other circumstances, this would be considered a straightforward case of theft. But since the people of Israel had been enslaved by the Egyptians (for 210 years according to rabbinic tradition), the worth of the valuables that they took with them was easily offset by the market value of more than two centuries of forced servitude. Fair is fair.
But what did any of this have to do with Joseph’s bones? The other Israelites were so busy counting all the booty they had taken out of Egypt that they completely forgot about Joseph’s bones; Moses alone remembered the oath they had sworn, so he alone went to get them. This certainly was accounted to his credit; as it says in the book of Proverbs, “the wise of heart will take commandments,” an unusual formulation—and take is exactly what Moses did.
A second midrashic answer relied on the well-known judicial principle called “measure for measure”: when someone commits a misdeed, his punishment (including the precise form of the punishment) should somehow be connected to what he did. This is what happened to David’s son Absalom, who (like some modern-day Jewish writers) was extremely vain about his massive locks (2 Sam 14:25-26). As a punishment, he ended up getting caught by his hair in some low-lying branches, which eventually led to his death.
But the Mishnah (Sotah 1:9) also mentions what might be called “disproportionate measure for measure” when it comes to good deeds. Here, the reward is held to be far greater than the original good deed itself. For example, Miriam waited only a brief while to see what would happen to her baby brother Moses when their mother placed him a box in the Nile (Exod 2:4). In recompense, the whole people of Israel later waited for Miriam for seven days until she could be taken back into the camp (Num 12:14).
So when Jacob died, the same principle of “disproportionate measure for measure” was applied: Jacob himself was brought to Canaan for burial by the greatest of his sons, Joseph. After this, Joseph surely could not be buried by his own brothers, who were of lesser rank; that is why his reburial in Canaan had to wait until someone greater than him came along, namely Moses. The Torah stressed this by singling out Moses in the verse cited, ““Moses took Joseph’s bones with him, since he [Joseph] had made the Israelites swear an oath.” Any of the Israelites might have taken Joseph’s bones, but only Moses could do so and uphold the principle of “disproportionate measure for measure.”
The third explanation of this verse maintains that Moses was the only one who could take Joseph’s bones out of Egypt. The reason that this was so is hinted at in Joseph’s own words cited above: “Joseph had made the Israelites swear an oath, saying ‘When God takes notice of you, you will carry up my bones from here with you.’” Why should Joseph have said that he was to be buried in Canaan “when God takes notice of you”? He ought to have said just what his father Jacob had said a few verses before: bury me in Canaan immediately following my death.
If instead Joseph had said to bury him in Canaan “when God takes notice of you,” it must have been because he knew that the Egyptians would not allow his bones to be removed right away. Apparently, the Egyptian wise men had foreseen that the time of the bones’ removal would be a very bad period for Egypt; they therefore resolved to hide Joseph’s remains and make it impossible for them to be retrieved. So they put Joseph’s bones in a watertight metal coffin and dropped it to the bottom of the Nile. That is why the biblical verse stresses Moses’ role: only Moses could remove them. Standing on the Nile’s shore, he called out, “Joseph! Joseph! The time of the oath has come… Do not delay your redemption, for on your account we are now being delayed.” Thereupon Joseph’s coffin floated to the surface and Moses took up Joseph’s bones.
Mo‘adim le-simḥah!
