How old was Joseph when he died?

One hundred ten years

Genesis gives the number twice, at the start and the end of Joseph’s last scene.

Joseph lived in Egypt, he, and his father’s house. Joseph lived one hundred ten years. Joseph saw Ephraim’s children to the third generation. The children also of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were born on Joseph’s knees.

Machir’s children were Joseph’s great-grandchildren, so he lived long enough to hold them. The other numbers in Genesis fill in the timeline. Joseph was sold at seventeen (37:2), stood before Pharaoh at thirty (41:46), and was thirty-nine when his family came down to Egypt. Jacob lived seventeen more years there (47:28), so Joseph was fifty-six at his father’s funeral and outlived him by fifty-four years. In all he spent some ninety-three years in Egypt, far longer than he had ever lived in Canaan.

Why 110?

Genesis does not explain the number, but an Egyptian reader would have recognized it. In Egyptian texts, 110 years was the ideal length of a blessed life. The Instruction of Ptahhotep, a classic of Egyptian wisdom literature, closes with the old sage saying he has reached 110 years. Joseph, the Hebrew who became an Egyptian grandee, dies at the perfect Egyptian age. Joshua, who led Israel into Canaan, also died at 110 (Joshua 24:29).

Among the patriarchs, Joseph’s life is the shortest. Abraham lived 175 years (25:7), Isaac 180 (35:28) and Jacob 147 (47:28). Jacob had already told Pharaoh that his own years were “few and evil” beside his fathers’ (47:9).

The bones that waited

Joseph took an oath from the children of Israel, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” So Joseph died, being one hundred ten years old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

That is the last sentence of Genesis. The book that opened with the making of the world closes on a coffin in Egypt and a promise.

The promise was kept. At the Exodus “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” (Exodus 13:19), and years later they were buried at Shechem, in the plot of ground Jacob had bought there (Joshua 24:32), not far from the fields where a seventeen-year-old Joseph once went looking for his brothers. The Letter to the Hebrews counts his instructions about his bones as an act of faith (Hebrews 11:22). A small domed building near Nablus, in the West Bank, is honored today as Joseph’s Tomb; it marks a tradition, not an archaeological identification.

After Joseph

Exodus picks up the thread in two lines: “Joseph died, as did all his brothers, and all that generation” (Exodus 1:6), and then “there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph” (1:8). His father’s age is in how old Jacob was when he died, and the man who carried his bones out of Egypt has his own page: how old Moses was when he died.