every endeavor to "lie" in the Holy Land, to make sure it
would belong to him and his descendants.[345] Nevertheless he
bade Joseph strew some Egyptian earth over his dead body.[346]

Jacob expressed these his last wishes three times. Such is
the requirement of good breeding in preferring a request.

In the last period of Jacob's life, one can see how true it is
that "even a king depends upon favors in a strange land."
Jacob, the man for the sake of whose merits the whole world
was created, for the sake of whom Abraham was delivered
from the fiery furnace, had to ask services of others while
he was among strangers,[347] and when Joseph promised to do
his bidding, he bowed himself before his own son, for it is a
true saying, "Bow before the fox in his day," the day of his