Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Three (The Death of Sarah)

In which Sarah dies at a ridiculously old age, and Abraham negotiates a burial site for her.

"Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old." (23:1) That's very old by Gregorian years and very young by Biblical years. I have to assume Bible years are getting closer to Gregorian years now because Sarah was incredulous a few chapters back that she should be able to have a healthy child at over 100 years of age. Since that's a reasonable concern by today's standards (hell, it's a reasonable concern that one might not have a healthy baby at the age of forty), so I'll make the asumption.

Sarah dies, and Abraham weeps. He then asks the Hittites to sell him some land so he can bury her. He's "a foreigner and stranger among" them (23:4), and doesn't feel comfortable placing her into the ground just anywhere.

However, the Hittites call him a "mighty prince" and offer up "the choices of our tombs. None of us will refuse you his tomb for burying your dead." (23:6)

A quick Google search reveals nothing about why the Hittites regard Abraham so highly. I thought that perhaps I'd forgotten something from earlier in Genesis — maybe something in one of the long tables of genealogy — and I was kind of right. Genesis 10:15 shows us that the Hittites are descendants of Canaan (and therefore a clan of Canaanites), and in Genesis 15:18-20, God assigns a bunch of land to Abraham's descendants, to include the land that at that time belonged in part to the Hittites. At the time, I didn't remark much on that specific aspect of the passage because there were some other, more glaring errors that I was focused on. Thinking back, I can't imagine the Hittites being terribly pleased with some random stranger from another tribe suddenly thinking he owns all their land. I have no idea why they should be this nice to Abraham.

They give Abraham an inch, and he takes a mile by asking that they "intercede with Ephron son of Zohar" and convince Ephron to sell Abraham Ephron's cave. To be fair, Abraham offers to pay full price for the cave.

Turns out that Ephron is rather conveniently present at the audience, and he randomly offers to give it away for free. Abraham offers once again to pay for it. Ephron says, "The land is worth four hundred shekels", but tells Abraham to just up and bury Sarah already without paying.

Abraham pays up the four hundred shekels (the footnotes inform me that this amounts to about ten punds of silver), and Ephron signs over the deed to his cave and the surrounding field. Abraham puts his wife in the cave.

The End.

This uneventful chapter happens to be the first in which my objections to the goings-on are very minor all around. A woman dies (at an improbably old age, like everyone else), and Abraham pays for a place to bury her (despite the sellers not having any real reason to sell the land). I'm afraid there's not much to discuss here.