Joseph's Resurrection
The theme of death and resurrection is all over Genesis, and finds its climax in the story of Joseph, which is all about going “down” and coming back “up.”
In Genesis 37, Joseph's brothers plan to kill him and “throw” his dead body down into a “pit” (telling us that this is a grave), but when Reuben intervenes, they decide to keep him alive in this pit, where “there was no water” (37:24). Importantly, throughout Genesis, water represents life (starting with the river of life flowing from Eden; and women, the givers of life, continuously showing up at wells), and so this comment once again tells us that Joseph was thrown down into the pit of death; that is until his brothers see some Ishmaelite traders and decide to “lift him up out of the pit” (37:28), enabling Judah to sell Joseph into slavery for twenty pieces of silver; and when he’s (falsely) told that his beloved son is dead, Israel prophetically wishes that he could go “down to the grave” to be with Joseph (37:35).
Furthermore, after being resurrected from the pit of death, Joseph is brought back “down to Egypt” (37:25, 39:1), and once there, he’s again “thrown” down into a prison. During his imprisonment, Joseph meets two men who ask him to interpret their dreams; Joseph does so and foretells how, in three days, both men are going to be “lifted up” out of the pit, except one will be raised to a place of honor in the king’s house, and the other will be put to death on a tree (note the contrast between life and death, connected to being brought “up” in 40:15-22).
Two years later when Joseph is “thirty years old” (41:46), he’s once again resurrected by being brought up “out of the pit” and appointed as the ruler of (the pit of) Egypt, and Pharaoh tells him that no one in the land will “lift up” their hand without his consent (41:44). At this point, Joseph’s brothers come “down to Egypt” in order to buy bread from the one they sold into slavery (42:2-3); and after Joseph and his brothers are eventually reconciled through Judah’s powerful display of repentance and sacrificial love, Joseph tells them to go “up out of the land of Egypt” to find his father, in order that they might be together before Israel himself goes to the pit of death (45:9-28); and indeed, this comes to pass in Genesis 46 when Joseph goes “up to meet Israel his father in Goshen” (46:29, a land said to be “like the Garden of the Lord” cf. 13:10), after which Israel (and his family) settles in the pit of Egypt to dwell with his beloved son Joseph as he prepares for death, fulfilling his wish to be with Joseph in the grave.
Before his death, Israel blesses his twelve sons and affirms that, through his repentance, Judah has been “lifted up,” for which cause “the scepter shall not depart” from his seed, who is promised the same lot as Joseph: “your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; [and] your father's sons shall bow down before you” (49:8-12 cf. 37:1-11), thus tying the resurrected seed of Judah to the life and ministry of Joseph.
Finally, Genesis ends by telling us about Joseph fulfilling Israel’s wish to “go up” out of the pit of Egypt and bury him alongside his forefathers (50:1-14); and before his own death, Joseph says to his brothers, “God will bring you up out of this land,” and he makes them swear that, “you shall carry up my bones [note: same word as ‘self’] from here,” before he’s laid to rest “in a coffin in Egypt” (50:24-26). The reason Joseph (and the other patriarchs) cares so much about where his dead body is buried is because he knows that the same God who lifted him up out of the pit of death, is the one who will lift him up out of the coffin of Egypt in the resurrection.