The Sepulcher

Genesis 24
The twenty-fourth chapter of Genesis is one of the shortest in the
book; yet it is so full of circumstances illustrative of primitive
customs and ideas, that every verse in it might form a sufficient
theme for one of our daily illustrations. We must, however, be
content to point out the general tendency and result of these
institutions.
The chapter relates the death of Sarah, and the negotiations of
Abraham with the people of the land for a burial place. Sarah died
at the encampment at Mamre, near Hebron, at the age of one
hundred and twenty-seven years. It is remarkable, that Sarah is
the only woman whose complete age, death, and burial are
mentioned in the Scripture. This was no doubt partly to confer
special honor on the mother of the Hebrew race; but is also
necessary, not only to form a proper introduction to the ensuing
relation of the purchase of a hereditary burial place, but to inform
us that it was vouchsafed to her to live thirty-seven years after
having brought forth Isaac at the age of ninety, and to see him
grown up to mans estate.
We first see Abraham mourning for his dead. He leaves his own
tent and goes to that of Sarah, and sits upon the ground before
the corpse, mourning, and not only mourning, but weeping for her.
Some here interpose the remark, that the Hebrew mourning was
for seven days, implying that Abraham sat for so many days
before the corpse. This is absurd. However long the mourning,
the burial of the dead has always taken place very soon in the
East, seldom later than the day after dissolution. It was, therefore,

with the freshness of his grief still upon him, that Abraham had to
consider how his dead should be buried out of his sight. This is a
question which is seldom in the East left to be considered in these
awful moments. But Abraham was a stranger in Canaan, and had
not acquired possession so much as of a sepulcher in the land
destined to be his heritage. This possession he had now, in this
trying hour, to seek; for both propriety and feeling required that
the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac, should not be
placed in any but a separate and appropriated family sepulcher,
well secured from future application to any other use.
There was in a field near Hebron a cave, which from its name of
Machpelah appears to have been double, and on this Abraham
had set his mind. It belonged to a person of wealth and distinction
among the Hethites (or Hittites), who then occupied Hebron. The
most obvious course would, according to our own usage, have
been to go to this person and ask him to sell his cave. But our
ability to do this with safety, arises from the perfection of the legal
securities which may pass privately between man and man. In
ancient times, no security was felt, especially in matters
connected with the sale and transfer of land, but in publicity and
the presence of witnesses. Hence, we see, throughout the
Scripture, all transactions of this nature conducted in public, and
usually in the gate of the city.
In the absence of buildings devoted to public business, and
perhaps at first in the want of such paramount authority in any
one magistrate or elder, as justified him in expecting the
attendance of the others at his own house, the town-gate was the
most natural and obvious place of concourse. Here a sufficiency
of witnesses to every transaction could be obtained: here the men
whose evidence was required, could attend with the least

hindrance, as they passed morning and evening to and from their

fields and their labor: and here, at such times, the parties whose
presence was especially needed, could be called, as they passed
by, without any need of an apparitor. We see an instance of this in
the book of Ruth. Boaz goes to the gate, and when the person
whom he requires, passes him, he calls to himHo such a one!
turn aside, sit down here, Rth_4:1.
So, now, having this object in view, Abraham proceeds to the gate
of the town, at the time that he knew the elders of the place would
be there assembled. He was received with attention and respect;
and on stating his wish to obtain possession of a burying place,
the answer wasHear us, my Lord: thou art a mighty prince
among us, in the choice of our sepulchers bury thy dead. They
did not seem to understand that he wanted an appropriated
sepulcher, and supposed they met his wishes by thus offering him
permission to deposit the body of Sarah in any of their own
tombs. But this, although a very handsome offer, according to the
notions of the East, did not meet the views of Abraham. He,
however, courteously acknowledged their civility, by rising from
his seat and bowing to the people of the land.
He wanted the cave of Machpelah, and he saw the owner
present; but being apparently doubtful that a person in such good
circumstances would be willing wholly to alienate a part of his
possessions, he does not propose the matter to him directly, but
requests the elders that they will intercede with Ephron, that he
may sell the cave to him for its full value in silver. Ephron who, if
so inclined; could not decently refuse a request thus tendered, by
such a man as Abraham, appears, nevertheless, in the eyes of
those whom experience has taught to see through the outward
shows of eastern character, to have been determined to make the

best bargain he could, consistently with the necessity of

preserving the appearance of liberality and deference. Abraham
wanted only the cave at the end of the field; but Ephron, while
professing three times in one sentence, to make the whole a free
gift to Abraham, takes care to intimate, that he will be expected to
take not only the cave, but the field in which it stood, probably in
the feeling that the value of the field to him would be deteriorated
by the presence in it of a sepulcher belonging to another. But
Abraham understands this show of boundless generosity very
well: and he could not but know that the acquisition would cost
him dear, if he consented to accept it as a present, and lay
himself under the obligation of meeting the future expectations of
Ephron, as to a suitable return of the favor. Besides, the proud
independence of the man who refused to allow the king of Sodom
the shadow of a ground for saying that he had made Abraham
rich, would assuredly prevent him, in any case, from accepting a
favor of this sort from any inhabitant of Canaan. He rose, and
bowed himself once more, not to Ephron, but to the people of the
land. But his words were addressed to Ephron, and without
objecting to the inclusion of the field in the bargain, he insisted on
paying the full price for the whole property.
Nothing now remained but for Ephron to name the value, which
he does with all the polite artifice of a modern Oriental; for his
words virtually amount to this: Why should friends and wealthy
men like us, use many words about a piece of land worth only
four hundred shekels of silver? Note: About fifty pounds. Bury thy
dead, and thou canst pay me this trifle hereafter. But having got
him to name his price, Abraham at once paid down the money in
the presence of the witnesses, Ephrons own countrymen; thus
securing the purchase beyond all question.

In the record of this concluding part of the transaction, we are told

that Abraham weighed to Ephron .... four hundred shekels of
silver, current money with the merchant. In these few words
several important facts meet our noticethat silver had become
the standard of value and the medium of exchange; but not yet,
perhaps, absolutely to the exclusion of other but less perfect
mediums; for Abraham clearly states (as in the original) his
intention to pay the full value in silver, as an advantage to the
party of whom he makes the purchase. That which silver had thus
already become, it remains throughout the Scripturefor gold
was never in ancient times more than a costly commodity, not the
standard of value; and, indeed, it is not such at this day in
scarcely any country but our own. Other countries may have
some small proportion of coins in gold, but the bulk of the
currency is in silver, and silver only is the standard of value.
The next point that engages our notice is, that the silver was
weighed. How does this consist with its being current money with
the merchant? If it were current money, what need of its being
weighed? That it was weighed at all, would suggest to most minds
that it was not coined moneyand various considerations would
seem to show that it was not. Among these circumstances we do
not, however, count the absence of any central authorityin
Canaan, for instancewhose stamp should give authenticity to
the coin; because if such a power existed anywhere, in Assyria or
in Egypt, the coins of that power would doubtless circulate beyond
the limits of its own territory, just as Spanish dollars are at this day
current over nearly all the world. The probabilities are that the
silver was cast into forms convenient for commercial
interchanges, and these receiving some mark or stamp which
showed that the metal was of the commercial standard of purity,
became current money with the merchantthe quantity being still

determined by weighing. It is even possible that the mere shape

of these pieces of silver was taken to determine the purity of the
metal; and that shape may have been in rings, which appears
from the monuments to have been the earliest form of money
among the ancient Egyptians.
But although it seems to us probable that money was not in this
early age properly coined, the fact of the silver being weighed is
by no means conclusive evidence against its being so. At this day
coined money is weighed in all the markets of the East; and even
among ourselves, when any of our readers has had occasion to
receive a sum in gold at the Bank of England, he will have had the
sovereigns weighed out to him in bulk. In the latter case this is
merely to save time, counting being a much slower process than
weighing. But a saving of time is the last thing ever thought of in
the East; and the weighing there of coined money is to secure
that the pieces shall be of just weight. This point is admirably
illustrated in an anecdote given by Mr. Fordyce. Before the time of
Lord Cornwallis, the silver rupee, for example, in Bengal, was of
considerable thickness, and bore a stamp on each side; but it was
not stamped, or, as it is called, milled, around the edges. Hence
it could be easily pared or cut in the edges, so that the ordinary
rupees were not all of one weight, in consequence of fraudulent
operations on them. The stamp showed the purity of the metal, so
as to render it current coin; but not being milled or stamped
around the edges, it was necessary to weigh it, in order to
ascertain that the proper weight in silver was delivered. Lord
Cornwallis, when governor-general, put an end to this
inconvenient kind of money, by establishing a mint at Calcutta, in
which thin pieces milled round the edges were coined, in order to
ascertain, as with us, both the quality and quantity of the coin, and
so to supersede the necessity of weighing the money. We doubt if

this simple contrivance has even yet, in the East, extended

beyond India. Some of the most valuable eastern coins, in gold
and silver, that we were a few years ago in the habit of seeing
daily, had scarcely any edge at all, but exhibited irregular masses
of metal around the border, dropping beyond the margin of the
impression made by the die, in such excrescent shapes, as
absolutely to suggest the idea of clipping, as an improvement to
the figure of the coin.