And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them:
The verse stands in the account of Jacob's death and burial in Egypt, belonging to the chapters that trace Israel's journey to Egypt and God's care in preserving the ancestors of the promised Seed, and it reports that his sons carried out his instructions concerning him. In doing so the sons fulfilled his instructions and dying commands by completing his burial rites, and the work included Joseph's care and sustenance of Jacob, obedience in his dying scene, his funeral obsequies, and a funeral march to a distant and foreign land to the cave of Machpelah where his mortal form was placed beside the dust of his father in the family tomb.
That obedient honoring of their father illustrates the respect for parents required by the fifth commandment. Such obedience proves that honor to parents was already binding law long before Sinai and already controlled God's chosen servants. As part of the history of Joseph, the verse teaches trust in God's guidance, since whatever God has intended a person for He will safely bring them to it, even if He leads them round about, for He will guide them right.
The verse records a splendid funeral procession as part of the outgoings and incomings of the patriarchs preserved in the Old Testament, alongside Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the field at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, and Esau reddened by desert sun-heat, showing real human existence in a half-peopled world of bleating flocks and pastoral rest within the great spectacle of human history. It belongs to the pleasant story in Genesis 50 of Joseph as a good boy who afterward became a great man, fit for a mother to tell her little child at her feet in the evening. That telling teaches the child to promise his mother that after her death he will be a good and great man and never disgrace her memory, so that the mother's words and Joseph's example keep him from falling into evil ways.
The verse stands in the account of Jacob's death and burial in Egypt, belonging to the chapters that trace Israel's journey to Egypt and God's care in preserving the ancestors of the promised Seed, and it reports that his sons carried out his instructions concerning him. In doing so the sons fulfilled his instructions and dying commands by completing his burial rites, and the work included Joseph's care and sustenance of Jacob, obedience in his dying scene, his funeral obsequies, and a funeral march to a distant and foreign land to the cave of Machpelah where his mortal form was placed beside the dust of his father in the family tomb.
That obedient honoring of their father illustrates the respect for parents required by the fifth commandment. Such obedience proves that honor to parents was already binding law long before Sinai and already controlled God's chosen servants. As part of the history of Joseph, the verse teaches trust in God's guidance, since whatever God has intended a person for He will safely bring them to it, even if He leads them round about, for He will guide them right.
The verse records a splendid funeral procession as part of the outgoings and incomings of the patriarchs preserved in the Old Testament, alongside Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the field at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, and Esau reddened by desert sun-heat, showing real human existence in a half-peopled world of bleating flocks and pastoral rest within the great spectacle of human history. It belongs to the pleasant story in Genesis 50 of Joseph as a good boy who afterward became a great man, fit for a mother to tell her little child at her feet in the evening. That telling teaches the child to promise his mother that after her death he will be a good and great man and never disgrace her memory, so that the mother's words and Joseph's example keep him from falling into evil ways.