Scriptures

New Living Translation (NLT)

Genesis 50
¹ Joseph threw himself on his father and wept over him and kissed him.
² Then Joseph told the physicians who served him to embalm his father’s body; so Jacob was embalmed.
³ The embalming process took the usual forty days. And the Egyptians mourned his death for seventy days.
⁴ When the period of mourning was over, Joseph approached Pharaoh’s advisers and said, “Please do me this favor and speak to Pharaoh on my behalf.
⁵ Tell him that my father made me swear an oath. He said to me, ‘Listen, I am about to die. Take my body back to the land of Canaan, and bury me in the tomb I prepared for myself.’ So please allow me to go and bury my father. After his burial, I will return without delay.”
⁶ Pharaoh agreed to Joseph’s request. “Go and bury your father, as he made you promise,” he said.
⁷ So Joseph went up to bury his father. He was accompanied by all of Pharaoh’s officials, all the senior members of Pharaoh’s household, and all the senior officers of Egypt.
⁸ Joseph also took his entire household and his brothers and their households. But they left their little children and flocks and herds in the land of Goshen.
⁹ A great number of chariots and charioteers accompanied Joseph.
¹⁰ When they arrived at the threshing floor of Atad, near the Jordan River, they held a very great and solemn memorial service, with a seven-day period of mourning for Joseph’s father.
¹¹ The local residents, the Canaanites, watched them mourning at the threshing floor of Atad. Then they renamed that place (which is near the Jordan) Abel-mizraim, for they said, “This is a place of deep mourning for these Egyptians.”