1. Then Joseph hugged his father’s face. He wept over him and kissed him.
2. Joseph instructed the physicians in his service to embalm his father, so the physicians embalmed Israel.
3. They took forty days, for that is the full time needed for embalming. The Egyptians mourned for him seventy days.
4. When the days of mourning had passed, Joseph said to Pharaoh’s royal court, “If I have found favor in your sight, please say to Pharaoh,
5. ‘My father made me swear an oath. He said, “I am about to die. Bury me in my tomb that I dug for myself there in the land of Canaan.” Now let me go and bury my father; then I will return.’”
6. So Pharaoh said, “Go and bury your father, just as he made you swear to do.”
7. So Joseph went up to bury his father; all Pharaoh’s officials went with him – the senior courtiers of his household, all the senior officials of the land of Egypt,
8. all Joseph’s household, his brothers, and his father’s household. But they left their little children and their flocks and herds in the land of Goshen.
9. Chariots and horsemen also went up with him, so it was a very large entourage.
10. When they came to the threshing floor of Atad on the other side of the Jordan, they mourned there with very great and bitter sorrow. There Joseph observed a seven day period of mourning for his father.