Soon Joseph will be Home Again
On Earth with his Father and Mother
As well as all eleven Brothers He Forgave
“God meant it unto good, to bring it to Pass”
September 6, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Genesis 50:16-26 – And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying, [17] So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto him. [18] And his brethren also went and fell down before his face; and they said, Behold, we be thy servants. [19] And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God? [20] But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. [21] Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them.
[22] And Joseph dwelt in Egypt, he, and his father’s house: and Joseph lived an hundred and ten years. [23] And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation: the children also of Machir the son Manasseh were brought up upon Joseph’s knees. [24] And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. [25] And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence.
[26] So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.
Romans 8:28 – And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Up until 1988, I had taken all the groups I led to see Jacob’s Well and Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank, but in December 1987, a collective Palestinian popular uprising erupted against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza areas. This period of violence is known as the Intifada, or “shaking off.” At first a spontaneous outburst instigated by false rumors and incitement by Muslim clerics, the Intifada quickly developed into a well-organized rebellion orchestrated by the PLO from its headquarters in Tunis. Masses of civilians attacked Israeli troops with stones, axes, Molotov cocktails, h and grenades,
and firearms supplied by the Fatah, killing and wounding soldiers and civilians. Israeli troops, trained for combat with opposing armies, were not well prepared to fight this kind of war.
I have not been able to take a group into this area since 1988, because in the early days of the al-Aqsa Intifada, on the morning of October 7, 000, Israel withdrew the small contingent of IDF border policemen who had
been guarding the site of the Tomb of the Patriarch Joseph and its Beshiva. The holy site was located in Shechem in Samaria, the town the Arabs call “Nablus”. Over the preceeding days, the Tomb had been attacked with gunfire, stones, and firebombs. The IDF defenders in the compound withstood the attacks and stopped several attempts by armed Palestinians to break in.
An IDF border policemen was wounded, and the heavy rioting prevented his evacuation for treatment in time to save his life. In order to prevent further loss of life and to lower tensions in the area, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak authorized the temporary evacuation of the site, based on the agreement of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to safeguard the location, in accordance with their obligations under the Oslo Accords to protect holy sites, Jewish and Christian, and ensure access by all. The PA also pledged to prevent any vandalism and to return the Tomb to its original state after the violence settled down. The PA pledge was brazenly violated about two hours after the Israeli evacuation, when a Palestinian Arab mob entered the Tomb compound and began to systematically destroy everything in sight, including all remnants of the Yeshiva.
The furniture and books that were left behind were burned by the mob. The Palestinian police s tood by, failing
to prevent any of these violent activities, despite their committment to guard the Tomb. Within hours, Joseph’s Tomb was reduced to a smoldering heap of rubble.
Within two days, as an Associated Press dispatch reported, “the dome of the tomb was painted green and bulldozers were seen clearing the surrounding area,” as the Palestinian Arabs sought to transform the biblical Joseph’s resting place into a Moslem holy site.
Israel’s withdrawal from the site was later understood as a grave strategic error. It marked the first time that the IDF had withdrawn under fire, surrendering territory to Palestinian Arab violence. Coming barely a week after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the retreat from Joseph’s Tomb sent a dangerous signal to Yasser Arafat, confirming that violence would force Israel to capitulate.
The retreat was also an affront to Jewish history and tradition, as Joseph’s Tomb had long been a focus of Jewish pilgrimage and prayer. The late Dr. Zvi Ilan, one of Israel’s foremost archeologists, described Joseph’s Tomb as:
… one of the tombs whose location is known with the utmost degree of certainty and is based on continuous documentation since biblical times. (“Tombs of the Righteous in the Land of Israel”, p. 365)
he Book of Joshua (24:32) states explicitly:
The bones of Joseph which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt were buried in Shechem in the portion of the field that had been purchased by Jacob.
(See also Gen. 33:19; Gen, 48:21-22; Gen. 50:24-25.)
Joshua 24:32 – And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for an hundred pieces of silver: and it became the inheritance of the children of Joseph.
The Midrash and other ancient texts mention the site, as did the early Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, who visited it nearly 1,700 years ago. Arab geographers, medieval Jewish pilgrims, Samaritan historians and 19th-century British cartographers provide consistent confirmation of the site’s location and verification as the true tomb of the Patriarch Joseph. After thousands of years of veneration by all faiths, Palestinian Arabs suddenly asserted the site was the tomb of a different holy man, a Muslim named Joseph, giving them an excuse to convert the location into a mosque.
The strategic error of withdrawing from Joseph’s Tomb is unlikely to be repeated.
When fire bombings and gunfire resumed at Rachel’s Tomb outside Bethlehem in 2002, the Israeli cabinet decided to include the site, by then fortified with barbed wire and concrete structures, within the boundaries of a security zone to be constructed around Jerusalem.
Begin Excerpt from Arutz Sheva
Efforts to Rebuild Biblical Tomb Desecrated By Arabs
5 Elul 5768, 05 September 08 12:27
by Gil Ronen
(IsraelNN.com) Samaria Regional Council head Gershon Mesika is spearheading a political and financial effort to rebuild the tomb of the biblical figure Joseph, located in Shechem, 30 miles north of Jerusalem. The tomb was desecrated and pillaged by Arabs in October 2000, and remains in an area under control of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Mesika was among nine busloads of Jews who entered Joseph’s Tomb at 1:00 A.M. Friday to say selichot, the penitential prayers that are customarily recited during the weeks preceding Rosh HaShana.
The Jewish worshippers, who brought generators with them for electricity, reported that the occasion was a moving one, despite the run down and ravaged state of the tomb, which is currently being used by Arabs as a garbage dump.
Rabbi Aharon Katzin of the Izri philanthropic foundation and Abe Cohen, a philanthropist from the U.S., participated in the late night prayer service. Mesika has established a lobby group numbering 25 Knesset members for restoring Joseph’s Tomb and hopes to recruit funds for the project.
Also present at the Tomb was Itzik Bar, IDF Commander of the Samaria Brigade . After getting off to a rocky start in his relationship with the Jewish population in the region, Brigade Commander Itzik Bar is said to be making efforts to become sensitive to the Jewish population’s values and faith.
Shortly after being named to the position of Samaria Brigade Commander, Bar created a negative first impression when he placed restrictions on Jews wanting to travel in portions of Judea and Samaria. The restrictions were explained as stemming from concern that Jewish nationalists were seeking to provoke violent clashes with the police. While they were in force, soldiers inspected Jewish vehicles at checkpoints and required permits to travel.
Ephraim Bluth, a leading figure in the region, wrote the following after his night visit to the destroyed tomb of Joseph:
I recently had an opportunity to visit the Tomb of the biblical Joseph – Yosef Hatzadik – in Shechem. Given the location, in a viper’s den of terrorism, such visits need be organized with the active cooperation of the IDF, which provides worshippers with several layers of security.
A disparate group of adults and teenagers, bonded by a mutual desire to pray at the tomb gathered at an army base situated near the Hawara Junction, just south of Shechem. Shortly after 1 a.m., we traveled to one of the entrances controlled by the IDF and entered Shechem from the east.
A few minutes later, we disembarked the bus and streamed into the remains of what had been (until October 2000) the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, encompassing Joseph’s tomb.
The visit was a difficult venture, from an emotional point of view. On the one hand, I felt a sense of privilege to be present at the burial site of one of our foremost religious and historical figures.
On the other hand, I felt a sense of sadness and betrayal that my own government has been, and continues to be, unable and unwilling to prevent the defiling of a site that is so precious and so holy to Jews.
From the torched and scarred ruins of Joseph’s tomb, amidst the rubble left behind by a local Arab mob, I was able to gaze up at the growing Jewish community of Elon Moreh and at the expanding yeshiva there which is at its core.
I drew a lesson from this experience: these visits to Joseph’s tomb must continue.
More than anything else, they demonstrate to our enemies that our connection to the Land of Israel, both past and present, will never be severed. Though our own national government has failed to establish and maintain the deterrence needed to insure that Jews can travel freely anywhere in Israel, we must continue to show through determined action, that we remain true to our past leadership and the legacy they left in our hands.
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