Genesis 50:5
My father made me swear, saying, Lo, I die: in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again. My father made me swear, saying, Lo, I die: in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again.
Jacob before his death made Joseph swear to bury him in the grave Jacob had dug and prepared for himself in the land of Canaan, and Joseph asked Pharaoh for permission to go and fulfill that promise. The request was to leave Egypt temporarily to go up and bury his father, with promise to return afterward. The saying belongs to the account of Jacob's death and burial in Canaan within Israel's journey to Egypt.
The burial place was the family burial place in the distant land of Canaan, the cave of Machpelah. Jacob's death was accompanied by an extended mourning in which the Egyptians mourned with his family for 77 days. Joseph's care in honoring his father's wishes and arranging the funeral and burial shows that the command to honor parents, the fifth commandment, governed the patriarchal family before its enactment at Sinai. As part of Joseph's history, the verse shows that God may lead a person by a roundabout path while still guiding him rightly.