‘ And Eleazar, the son of Aaron, died, and they buried him in the hill of (or Gibeah of) Phinehas his son which was given to him in the hill country of Ephraim.'
Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, also died. Thus the old generation was dying out. This man too had been looked to as one of the greats. The future lay in new hands, but they would not prove capable of sustaining it.
He was buried in the inheritance of his son Phinehas, given to him in the hill country of Ephraim. This was probably in Benjamin, for that was the part of the hill country of Ephraim in which rights to dwell in cities were allotted to the priests (Joshua 21:17-18).
So the book ends with the burial of three men who had lived in Egypt but were buried in Canaan as God had promised Israel. One of them had declared long before his certainty that one day Israel would return to the land promised by God (Genesis 50:24-25). The lives of the other two had witnessed all the events described in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua, and they had lived to see downtrodden Israel at rest in the land of promise. It was a fitting end to this triumphant book.