And Sarah died in Kiriat-Arba, which is Hebron in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
In the land of Canaan (later called Palestine by the Romans), Abraham—the father of the Israelites and “a multitude of nations”—purchases a field to bury his wife Sarah, who has just died. Eventually, in addition to Sarah, Abraham himself, along with the other patriarchs and matriarchs, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, will also be buried there.
The lengthy description of the highly choreographed negotiations between Abraham and the citizens of Hebron, where the burial place is to be located, is puzzling. There must be a reason for such an elaborated account, particularly when considering the paucity of information surrounding Moses’ grave (“no one knows his burial place to this day.” Devarim (Deuteronomy), Chapter 34 verse 6).
Abraham is not instructed to bury his wife in a specific location, nor is there any mention of mourning rituals. As the TaNaKh’s first treatment of burial, Abraham acts independently, without divine guidance. In doing so, he makes a profoundly human statement.
Abraham’s objective, as repeatedly emphasized throughout the chapter, is to bury “his dead.” To achieve this, he requires ownership of a piece of property.
Once the title to the burial field passed to Abraham, Jewish history in the land of Israel began.
It is ironic to note that the man to whom the entire land has been promised must seek permission from the local population and pay a substantial sum of money to acquire a mere burial plot. But through its history of dispersion and return, Israel has perennially purchased or compensate for getting back the land that was once theirs.
As lawyer Elyakim Haetzni asserted, “If having been somewhere before is an argument, then we have a super-argument, because we were here before the before.”
Not long before his incapacitating stroke in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit, “Can you conceive that one-day Jews will not live in Hebron?… If we were a normal nation, when a visitor arrived here, we would take him not to Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem] but rather to Hebron. We’d take him to where our roots are… No other people has anything like it.”