Sarah dies, Abraham looks to give her a proper burial. I decide that I, like many Americans, have no real problems
Usually I try to lighten my posts up with a healthy dose of snarkiness, but it's hard to find anything funny about a grieving old man who is trying to find a final resting place for his wife.
Sarah lived a good long life of 127 years. She died in Canaan where she and Abraham were strangers among the Hittites that lived there. Abraham appealed to the Hittites to sell him a plot of land that he can make into a burial site. They were very accommodating; a man named Ephron offered to give Abraham the land for free, but Abraham insisted on paying a fair price.
The land was bought, and Sarah was put to rest.
The tomb where Sarah - and eventually Abraham - were buried still exists today and is called the "Cave of the Patriarchs". It is also said to be the burial place for three other Biblical couples: Adam and Eve, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah. I find the Adam and Eve bit hard to believe since there's no specific mention of their burial place in the actual Bible.
Not surprisingly, the tomb has great significance to the three Abrahamic religions, and of course has been the source of much conflict for thousands of years. It has switched between Jewish and Muslim possession several times, most recently being captured by the Israelis after the Six Day War in 1967.
In one particularly gruesome episode, in 1994 an Israeli physician named Baruch Goldstein entered the tomb with a sub machine gun and opened fired on a group of Muslims who were at prayer there, killing twenty-nine and injuring a hundred and twenty-five more before he himself was killed by the survivors. Amazingly, Baruch is revered by some as a hero, his grave reading, "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel".
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Can't make it out to Hebron this year? Take a virtual tour of the Cave of the Patriarchs at its official website.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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