Endnote 9 – Why Didn’t Joseph Call Home?

The rabbis go out of their way to show that even the wagons that Joseph sent back to his father laden with gifts (Genesis 45:21) were signs of his fidelity to Judaism. The Hebrew word for wagons, agalot, say the rabbis, was Joseph’s way of telling Jacob that he, the Egyptian viceroy, was thinking of the eglah arufa, the sacrifice required when a dead body was found equidistant between two cities (Deuteronomy 21:1–9). Jacob had supposedly been studying that very concept when Joseph’s wagons arrived.