t12papocrypha
Testament of Simeon 8
Simeon dies at one hundred and twenty years and is placed in a sealed coffin for eventual reburial at Hebron — the same resting-place covenant Joseph carried. The detail that Egypt's sorcerers bound Joseph's bones in a royal treasury, forewarning that his departure would bring darkness and plague upon Egypt, is not incidental: it reads as an inversion of the Exodus pattern, where Joseph's bones (carried by Moses per Genesis 50 and Exodus 13) are the trigger-point for Egypt's unraveling. The bones are a covenant token — their removal signals the end of Egypt's hold on Israel and the beginning of the gathering back to the land of inheritance.
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And Simeon made an end of commanding his sons, and slept with his fathers, being an hundred and twenty years old. And they laid him in a coffin of incorruptible wood, to take up his bones to Hebron. And they carried them up in a war of the Egyptians secretly: for the bones of Joseph the Egyptians guarded in the treasure-house of the palace; for the sorcerers told them that at the departure of the bones of Joseph there should be throughout the whole of Egypt darkness and gloom, and an exceeding great plague to the Egyptians, so that even with a lamp a man should not recognise his brother.
