Joseph's Bones
An oath kept for four hundred years
Joseph died in Egypt, powerful and honoured, and still he did not want to stay there. "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. So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt" (Genesis 50:25–26). Generations later, on the night of the Exodus, "Moses took the bones of Joseph with him" (Exodus 13:19). At the end of the conquest, "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" (Joshua 24:32; compare Genesis 33:19). Hebrews counts it as faith: Joseph "gave commandment concerning his bones" (Hebrews 11:22). He was sure God would keep the promise even though he would not live to see it.
Shechem
Ancient Shechem is the mound of Tell Balata, on the eastern edge of the modern city of Nablus, in the pass between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. It is where Abraham first stopped in Canaan (Genesis 12:6), and its identification is secure.
The site called Joseph's Tomb
About 300 metres from Jacob's Well there is a small domed building known as Joseph's Tomb. The present structure dates from a rebuilding in 1868 and contains nothing older than that. The tradition behind it is much older: the pilgrim from Bordeaux, travelling in AD 333, was shown a tomb of Joseph at Shechem, and Eusebius in the same century records that it was pointed out near Neapolis (Nablus). Before that it appears to have been a Samaritan holy place.
What it shows
That Scripture ties Joseph's burial to Shechem, a real and securely identified place, and that Christians, Jews, and Samaritans have pointed to a tomb there since at least the fourth century.
What it does not show
There is no archaeological evidence that the building at Nablus is Joseph's grave, and no find has been identified with him. Scholars have not determined whether the present cenotaph marks the ancient biblical burial.
Where scholars divide
The site itself is contested. Many Palestinians hold that it is the grave of an eighteenth-century Muslim holy man, Sheikh Yusuf Dawiqat, and some early Muslim geographers placed Joseph's grave at Hebron instead. The building has been attacked and burned more than once, in 2000, 2015, and 2022. Separately, readers of Scripture should know one difficulty: Stephen, in Acts 7:16, speaks of the patriarchs being "laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem," while Genesis says Jacob bought the Shechem plot (Genesis 33:19) and Abraham bought Machpelah. Commentators have long seen Stephen compressing the two purchases in a quick summary; others read it as an error in his speech that Luke recorded faithfully. The page names the difficulty rather than hiding it.
Related: Joseph, Sold by His Brethren (Joseph as a type of Christ) and The Cave of Machpelah. Site history from the standard descriptions of Joseph's Tomb, the Bordeaux Pilgrim (AD 333), and Eusebius's Onomasticon. Sources checked 2026-09-24: Joseph's Tomb; The fraught history of Joseph’s Tomb (Institute for Palestine Studies). Scripture quotations from the King James Version. This page reports what was found and what it can bear; where a claim rests on tradition or a disputed reading, it says so.