It is roughly the middle of the second millennium b.c. in the heat of the Nile delta. Men seal a corpse inside a heavy wooden coffin. The air hangs thick with defensive anxiety and profound physical exhaustion as a regional war distracts the Egyptian guards. Smuggling the bones of a patriarch out of a foreign land requires sheer muscle and absolute silence. They hoist the timber box to carry it across the desert, finding ultimate consolation in the promise of their own ancestral dirt.
Simeon dies at one hundred twenty years of age. His sons prepare his remains for the harsh journey out of Egypt. They work in secret and wait for a violent conflict to break out among the local factions. The Egyptians heavily guard the palace treasure-houses where they keep the remains of Joseph as a talisman. To bypass these fortifications, the sons of Simeon load the coffin—a dead weight of over two hundred pounds—onto an animal cart and slip away in the chaos. Securing the dead is a basic matter of survival and tribal law for these men.
The wooden coffin serves as a physical anchor for a fractured family. It is a crude box built for transport rather than a monument built for display. A patriarch passes his authority to his surviving brothers. His sons then package his remains to ensure the bones do not become the property of a foreign state. The men drag the timber across the terrain because a displaced tribe needs a tangible object to hold when maintaining a shifting identity. The Lord allows the Gentile nations to construct massive stone temples, but he secures his promises in portable wooden crates.
A man's final instructions carry no real weight until his sons have to drag his casket through enemy territory.
The sons successfully hauled the bones of Simeon back to Hebron. The heavy timber eventually rotted away in the caves of Machpelah, leaving only a settled geographic coordinate for a wandering people.