Notes 26. The cave at Machpelah (23:1-20)

SYNOPSIS: When Sarah passes away, Abraham buys a piece of land from the locals ("Hittites"), and a detailed account follows of the purchase. It is a field near Mamre which contains the Machpelah Cave, which is sold to Abraham by Ephron son of Zoar for four hundred silver shekels.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

We now begin the last of the three parashot or sections that make up the Abraham cycle. The major events of his life have already been dealt with and it remains to tell how he wrapped up his business, first with the burial of his wife and then the arrangements he made for the marriage of his son Isaac. This section, xaye sara 'Sarah's life', takes its name from the fact that it begins by informing of her death in the conventional manner, by telling us her age when she dies, i.e. how long she lived.

I already discussed this passage here. Abraham lived in Hebron at a place called Mamre. The narrative refers to the locals as xittim 'Hittites' or, in typical biblical style, as b'ne xet 'sons (or children) of Het' (just as, for example, the Israelites will later be referred to as b'ne yisra'el 'sons (and daughters, i.e. "children") of Israel'.

Scholars agree that these were not "the Hittites" of general history, but some other (unrelated) people referred to by the same name. However, they were also not the indigenous Semitic peoples of the area usually referred to as Canaanites; like the Israelites themselves (apparently), they were more recent settlers, presumably with their own culture and even language.

In this passage we are first informed very briefly (vv. 1-2), without further ado, that Abraham's wife Sarah passed away in Hebron at the grand old age of 127. Abraham grieved for her, and then got down to the business of acquiring a small piece of property so that he could bury his wife in land that he owned. This is the only description in Genesis of a commercial transaction in which a patriarch buys land from local inhabitants, and nearly all the passage is a description of this proceeding, in which Abraham "bargains" with the sons of Heth. The talk that is reported sounds cordial enough, but probably should be understood as the language of diplomacy, and the most likely explanation for the inclusion of such a passage in Genesis is not that it is to show what nice people the local Hittites were or what good friends they were to Abraham, but rather to lay emphasis on the fact that the burial place of the patriarchs is property that rightfully belongs to Abraham's descendants and nobody else; it has even been suggested that the passage itself constitutes a legal document to that effect.

Speiser (EAS, p. 171-2) points out the importance of this passage "in retrospect" since this is the first testimony of the legal acquisition of land ownership in Canaan by ancestors of the Israelites, although so small as to be merely symbolic. The occasion was the death of the first matriarch, and the circumstances put both her person and the anecdote of the land purchase in a very special position in the unfolding story of their history. Genesis later also tells of the burial of Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, all at Machpela.

23:2 qiryat arba‛ hi xevron
We met the name Hebron (xevron) early in the Abraham cycle (13:18, JPS): waye'ehal avram vayyavo vayyéshev b'elone mamre asher b'xevron 'And Abram moved his tent, and came to dwell at the terebinths of Mamre, which are in Hebron.' The name has been glossed as 'confederacy', assuming it is related to the noun xaver 'companion' and other manifestations of the same root. As for the first name that appears here, qirya (of which qiryat is the construct state) means 'town, city'; a variant, qéret, which comes from *qart-, is the same word as in Phoenician known from e.g. Carthago, a Phoenician colony in what is now Tunisia (ultimately < Phoenician *qart ḥadašt 'new city', corresponding to H "qéret xadasha"); and arba‛ is H for 'four'. Thus a possibility is that qiryat arba‛ originally meant 'city of four' (perhaps meaning an alliance of four, cf. xevron??); another, defended by Speiser, is that the name might really be of an unknown non-Semitic origin, and was later reanalysed as meaning that. It seems unlikely that we shall ever know.

23:3 el b'ne xet
See the comment at the top.

23:4 ff.

Notice the rigid formality of the dialogue between Abraham and the "children of Het", which comes over clearly to us even across the thousands of years since this text first crystallized. It reads like a court hearing or something similar (a kalpuli proceeding, perhaps, for Nawat speakers), with an elegant redundance of explicit concepts.

23:4-6 
The crux of the "negotiation" seems to be this: the Hittites offer to let Abraham bury his wife in any of their graves that he likes (b'tokhénu b'mivxar q'varenu q'vor et metékha 'Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places'), but Abraham insists that what he wants is to acquire a property of his very own on which to make a tomb for Sarah (t'nu li axuzzat qéver 'Sell me a burial site among you'); he is not interested in sharing or receiving the use of a grave as a favour, he wishes to buy. The obstacle may have been a legal one, alluded to by Abraham as a preamble to his request: ger w'tashov anokhi ‛immakhem 'I am a resident alien among you.' Quite possibly "resident aliens" were not permitted to own real estate. In this light, the Hittites' reply conveyed something more than polite hospitality, perhaps. Note also the modesty of Abraham's request, in such a context: he makes it clear that he is only asking for enough land to bury his dead.

23:7 wayyáqom avraham wayyishtáxu
The verb q-w-m 'to arise' is very often used in BH as an auxiliary of sorts in a kind of serial construction in narratives: '(he) arose and (he) VERBed' just seems to emphasize the performance of the action and is scarcely translatable. So, wayyáqom wayyélekh might be rendered 'he upped and went' (which basically means: 'he went'), but there is something comical about this way of rendering it in the present sentence, since 'he upped and bowed down' sounds like some sort of joke if taken too literally. This verse then is a good example of the value of q-w-m in such constructions, which it is quite unnecessary, here or elsewhere, to translate mechanically as 'he arose and...'.

23:9 makhpela
This must have been the name of a district of Hebron.

23:15 sh'ma‛éni éretz arba‛ meot shéqel késef beni uven'kha ma hi
One is forced to smile at the phrasing here which shows how little change there has been in bargaining styles over the millennia: 'Listen, a piece of land worth four hundred silver sheckels, what's that between you and me?' Was Abraham extorted; was it a wildly excessive price for what he was getting? Commentators range in their opinions from "we can't be sure what a sheckel was worth in those days" to "yes, definitely!!

23:16-18
This reads like a legal document, a receipt for a sale of real estate.