Genesis/Bereshith 23: "Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Makpelah"

[Until we started reading Rabbinic commentary on the Torah, we missed the connection between the previous chapter and this one.

Supposedly, the reason Sarah dies (aside from old age) is because of the heartbreak she–as any mother of a one and only son–goes through from knowing that Abraham will dutifully fulfill the most shocking instruction ever given him by the God who has been leading him step by step from the time of his calling.  

Except for giving in to Sarah’s recourse to producing a son by Hagar, Abraham’s record of obedience to YHWH’s instructions deserves an ‘A’; but submitting to this strange commandment from a God who has promised him progeny as many as stars in the sky he can barely count . . . places him on the exemplary level of faith!  How many of parents would go to this extent? In fact just recently, I heard a mother lament over the death of her 30-something son:  “I wish God had taken me instead of my son; I have already lived a full life.”  

What about Sarah? At her age, indeed having lived a full life, this heartbreaking incident was too much of a demand from the God Who made many promises about this son. Could she not have known?  And if she did, might she have thought this was punishment for her failing to wait for the promise to be fulfilled, offering her maidservant Hagar to produce an heir for Abraham? We can only speculate.

Commentary is from Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz; translation is EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses with  commentary ; additional commentary by RA/Robert Alter. —Admin1.]

Genesis/Bereshith 23

1 Now Sara’s life was one hundred years and twenty years and seven years, (thus) the years of Sara’s life.

a hundred and seven and twenty years.  lit. ‘a hundred years, and twenty years, and seven years’; since the word ‘year’ is inserted after every figure, the Rabbis comment:  ‘She was as handsome at one hundred as at the age of twenty; and as sinless at twenty as at seven.’ (This, according to Luzzatto and Berliner, was the original form of the saying.)

[EF] (thus) the years of Sara’s life:  She is the only biblical woman whose life span is given, again as a sign of importance.

[RA]  years, the years.  The Hebrew is still more extravagant in its use of repetition, unusually repeating “year” after a hundred, after twenty, and after seven.  The same device of stylistic emphasis is used in the obituary notices of Abraham and Ishmael.

2 Sara died in Arba-town, that is now Hevron, in the land of Canaan. Avraham set about to lament for Sara and to weep over her;

Kiriath-arba. lit. ‘the city of four’.  In Judges I,10, it is stated that Kiriath-arba was the old name of Hebron, and in that city the Israelites slew three giant chieftains, the sons of a man named Arba (See Josh. XV,13).  Hence the city was named after Arba:  or it signified the city of these four giants.

Hebron. See XIII,18.

to mourn. The Hebrew word indicates the loud wailing still usual in the East as a manifestation of grief.

[RA] Kiriath-Arba, which is Hebron. The older name of the town means “city of four,” perhaps a reference to its being a federation (a possible meaning of “Hebron”) of four townlets.  (Alternately, the name might refer to “four hills.”) But some scholars think the earlier name is a Hebraization of a non-Semitic place-name, which would have been given to the town by its “Hittite” inhabitants.

3 then Avraham arose from the presence of his dead and spoke to the Sons of Het, saying:

rose up. This verb is used because the mourner sat and slept on the ground; see II Sam. XII,16; Lam. II,10.

children of Heth. i.e. the Hittites; see on X,15.

[EF] Sons of Het:  Or “Hittites,” not to be confused with the great Hittite empire in Asia Minor.  Here the name describes a Canaanite group.

4 I am a sojourner settled among you;

give me title to a burial holding among you, so that I may 

bury my dead from my presence.

stranger and a sojourner. A proverbial phrase describing one whose origin is foreign, and whose period of residence is uncertain (Ryle).

out of my sight.  Better, ‘from before me.’  

This is the first reference in the Bible to burial’ and the reverential concern which the Patriarch shows to give honourable sepulchre to his dead has been a distinguishing feature among his descendants.  Meth mitzvah, care of the unburied body of a friendless man, takes precedence over all other commandments.  Burial is the Jewish method of disposal of the dead.  Tacitus (Hist. V,5) remarked upon the fact that the Jews buried their dead, instead of burning them.  Cremation has always been repugnant to Jewish feeling, and is at total variance with the law and custom of israel.

[EF]  a sojourner: Even after many years, Avraham is still acutely aware of his nonnative status in the land.

[RA] sojourning settler. . . Grant me a burial-holding.  The Hebrew, which reads literally, “sojourner and settler,” is a legal term that means “resident alien,” but the bureaucratic coloration of that English equivalent misrepresents the stylistic decorum of the Hebrew.  At the very beginning of Abraham’s speech, he announces his vulnerable legal status, a hard fact of institutional reality which stands in ironic tension with his inward consciousness that the whole land has been promised to him and his seed.  “Grant”—literally “give”—is pointedly ambiguous both here and in the subsequent exchange with Ephron.  Abraham avoids the frank term “sell,” yet speaks of acquiring a “holding” (‘auzah), a word that clearly indicates permanent legal possession.

5 The Sons of Het answered Avraham, saying to him:

[EF] 5-6 saying to him/Hear us: Others use “saying/No, hear us.”

6 Hear us, my lord!

You are one exalted by God in our midst—

in the choicest of our burial-sites you may bury your dead,

no man among us will deny you his burial-site

for burying your dead!

a mighty prince. lit. ‘a prince of God’; similarly, ‘mountains of God’ means ‘great mountains’.

in the choice of our sepulchres.  Family or tribal vaults were common in ancient times, and the Hittites gave Abraham permission to select any one of these vaults; but the Patriarch insists on a separate resting-place for his wife.  He probably had the intention of being buried there himself.  If such was his intention, it was fulfilled; see XLIX,29.

6-18.  The bargaining which follows, with grandiloquent phrases and lavish offers, not to be taken too seriously by the person addressed, is still typically Oriental.

[EF] one exalted: Others use “a prince.”

[RA] Pray.  This translation follows E.A. Speiser, as well as the ancient Aramaic version of Yonatan ben Uziel, in reading lu for lo )”to him”) and moving the monosyllabic term from the end of verse 5 to the beginning of verse 6.  The identical emendation is made at the end of verse 14 moving into the beginning of verse 15.  Though one critic, Meir Sternberg (1991), has made an ingenious attempt to rescue the Masoretic Text at these two points, there is a simple compelling argument against it:  the formula for introducing direct speech, le’mor, “saying,” is always immediately followed by a direct speech, not by a preposition “to him” (lo).  And the repetition of the optative particle lu, “pray,” is just right for beginning each round of this elaborately polite bargaining.

You are a prince of God among us! In the pick of our graves bury your dead. On the surface of this is a courtly gesture of extravagant generosity.  But as Meir Sternberg (1991), who provides an acute reading of the sinuous turns of the subsurface bargaining, nicely shows, there is ambiguity of intention here: a certain exaggeration in calling Abraham a prince of God—which could simply mean “preeminent dignitary”—“among us” (he had claimed to be only “with” them); and a pointed deletion of any reference to a “holding” or to transfer of property.

7 Avraham arose,

he bowed low to the People of the Land, to the Sons of Het,

 

people of the land.  Heb. Am ha-aretz, which elsewhere means ‘the people of the land’, and in later Hebrew, ‘an ignorant person,’ here means the Council of the Hittites in session.  Abraham desired to secure a burial place that should for ever remain a possession of his family.  Such ‘freehold’ purchase was impossible without the assent of the local Hittite national Council.  ‘The expression am ha-aretz occurs 49 times in Scripture.  In 42 of these instances it means neither the nation nor an individual boor, but is simply a technical term of Hebrew Politics and signifies what we would call Parliament.’  Judge Mayer Sulzberger, The Am ha-aretz, the Ancient Hebrew Parliament, Philadelphia, 1910.

[EF] People of the Land: Possibly a title indicating notables, as in later usage, the “common folk.”

8 and spoke with them, saying:

If it be then according to your wish

that I bury my dead from my presence,

hear me and interpose for me to Efron son of Tzohar, 

9 that he may give me title to the cave of Makhpela, that is his, that is at the edge of his field,

for the full silver-worth let him give me title in your midst for a burial holding

the cave of Macpelah. It was a common practice to bury in caves.  The word which is the name of the cave and of the locality denotes ‘double’: possibly because it consisted of two storeys.

full price.  lit. ‘full silver’; Abraham wished to establish an unassailable right tot he land by the payment of its value.

[RA] at the far end of his field. In settling on this particular location for a burial cave, Abraham wants to make it clear that he will not need to pass through or encroach on the rest of the Hittite property.  Field,” sadeh, a flexible term for territory that stretches from field to steppe, could mean something like “land” or “property” in context, but rendering ti as “field’ preserves the distinction from ‘erets, “land,” as in the repeated phrase, “folk of the land.”

At the full price.  At this point Abraham makes it altogether unambiguous that the “grant’ he has been mentioning means a sale.  The Hebrew is literally “with full silver,” and the phrase in verse 16, “the silver that he spoke of,” refers back to this speech.

10 Now Efron had a seat amidst the Sons of Het,

and Efron the Hittite answered Avraham in the ears of the Sons of Het,

of all who had entry to the council-gate of his city,

saying:

Ephron was sitting. Presiding over the session of the Assembly.

in the hearing. i.e. publicly; ‘all that went out of the gate of his city,’ XXXIV,24.

[EF] of all who had entry: Similar to “People of the Land” —the aristocrats.

[RA] in the hearing of the Hittites, all the assembled in the gate of his town.  Legal business as conducted in the gateway: the men assembled there constitute, as E.A. Speiser proposes, a kind of town council: and these two phrases in apposition are a legal formula.  Scholarship has abundantly observed that the actual language used by Ephron and Abraham and the narrator bristles with set terms familiar from other ancient Near Eastern documents for the conveyance of property.

11 Not so, my lord, hear me!

The field I give to you,

and the cave that is therein, to you I give it; 

before the eyes of the Sons of My People I give it to you—

bury your dead!

give I thee.  An expression of conventional politeness, neither intended nor taken literally.

[RA] Pray, my lord, hear me. Reading here lu for the Masoretic lo’ (“no”).  This polite formula for initiating speech is not the sort of repetition that allows significant variation.

The field.  As Meir Sternberg shrewdly notes, Abraham had wanted to buy only the cave at the far end of the field, and so Ephron’s seeming generosity in throwing the unrequested field into the bargain is a ploy for demanding an exorbitant price.

I grant you…I grant it … I grant it.  This is a performative speech-act, the repetition indicating that Ephron is formally conveying the plot to Abraham.  Ephron, of course, knows that what Abraham really wants is to be able to buy the land and thus acquire inalienable right to it, and so this “bestowal” is really a maneuver to elicit an offer from Abraham.

12 Avraham bowed before the People of the Land
13 and spoke to Efron in the ears of the People of the Land, saying: 

But if you yourself would only hear me out!

I will give the silver-payment for the field,

accept it from me, so that I may bury my dead there. 

14 Efron answered Avraham, saying to him: 

15 My lord-hear me!

A piece of land worth four hundred silver weight,

what is that between me and you!

You may bury your dead!

what is that betwixt me and thee?  What can such a sum as that just mentioned matter to persons such as we?  In this apparently unconcerned tone, the seller indicates the price he wants.  The sum demanded, four hundred shekels of silver, is a very substantial sum, perhaps equivalent in purchasing power to from £1,000 to £2000 in our time.  In the contemporary Code of Hammurabi (see XIV,1) the wages of a working man for a year are fixed at six or eight shekels (Bennett).

[RA] Land for four hundred silver shekels. A comparison with the prices stipulated for the purchase of property elsewhere in the Bible suggests that this pittance is actually a king’s ransom.  Abraham, having twice declared his readiness to pay “the full price,” is in no position to object tot he extortionate rate.  In fact, his only real bargaining aim has been to make a legitimate purchase, and he is unwilling to haggle over the price, just as he refused to accept booty from the king of Salem.  Perhaps Ephron refers to the property as “land” (‘erets) instead of sadeh in order to provide rhetorical mitigation for the huge sum, intimating, by way of a term that also means “country,” that Abraham is free to imagine he is getting more than a field with a burial cave for his money.

16 Avraham hearkened to Efron:

Avraham weighed out to Efron the silver-worth

of which he had spoken in the ears of the Sons of Het—

four hundred silver weight at the going merchants’ rate.

weighed.  There were no coins of standard size and shape; therefore the pieces of silver had to be weighed before their value could be ascertained.

current money with the merchant. The phrase probably denotes that the silver was in convenient-sized pieces, readily usable in business transactions.

[RA]  heeded. That is, agreed.  But it is the same verb, “to hear” (shama’), repeatedly used at the beginning of the bargaining speeches.

weighed out …four hundred silver shekels.  The transaction antedates the use of coins, and the silver is divided into weights (the literal meaning of shekel).

[RA] 17-20.  The language of these concluding verses is emphatically legalistic, recapitulating the phraseology that would appear in a contract for the conveyance of property.  The verbal stem, qanah, “to buy,” which was studiously avoided in the bargaining, finally surfaces in the term for “possession” (miqnah).  Many interpreters view this whole episode as a final gesture of the aged Abraham toward laying future claim to possession of the land.  Meir Sternberg, on the other hand, reads it as thematically coordinated with the previous episode of the binding of Isaac:  first the promise of seed seems threatened in the command to sacrifice Isaac; then the promise of the land seems to be mocked in Abraham’s need to bargain with these sharp-dealing Hittites for a mere gravesite.

17 Thus was established the field of Efron, that is in Makhpela, that faces Mamre,

the field as
well as the cave that is in it, and the trees that were in all the field, that were in all their territory round
about,
18 for Avraham as an acquisition,

before the eyes of the Sons of Het, of all who had entry to the council-gate of his city.

were made sure. i.e. were assured to Abraham.  this verse may well be a citation from the deed of assignment which was drawn up at the purchase.  Contracts of this kind, dating from very early Semitic times, have been discovered in large numbers.

in the presence of.  The sale was duly witnessed; Jer. XXXII,12.

For generations, nay centuries, the children of Israel were to have no point of fixity save the sepulchre of the Patriarchs.  The Cave of Machpelah is regarded with immense veneration by the Mohammedans, who built a large mosque over it, and until recently altogether excluded both Jews and Christians from viewing it.  A visit is still fraught with considerable difficulty for a Jew.

19 Afterward Avraham buried Sara his wife

in the cave of the field of Makhpela, facing Mamre, that is now Hevron, in the land of Canaan.
 20 Thus was established the field as well as the cave that is in it for Avraham as a burial holding,
from the Sons of Het.