Genesis: Abraham's Odyssey, Part 3

The View from Nebo: How Archeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East
by Amy Dockser Marcus

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Throughout its history, Hebron had been relatively poor compared to other cities in Judah. Situated in a remote and hard-to-reach location, the settlement was in an agricultural frontier zone, bordering the desert. Hebron's fortunes changed for the better in the tenth century B.C.E., when a new wave of settlement began. There is evidence of more impressive construction, and as time passed, fortresses were built and the city expanded, until it eventually became the most important and largest center in southern Judah. Ofer believes that King David's coronation in Hebron, as recounted in the Bible, and the seven years the town served as his capital before he moved to Jerusalem, took place during the period that the archaeological record shows Hebron at its peak. But he is quick to point out that even at that time, it remained the richest city in an impoverished, distant section of Judah. Although Hebron was David's capital, it was the capital of a very circumscribed region. "According to the Bible, David left for Jerusalem as soon as he could, and you can't blame him," said Ofer in a 1999 interview. "You can't control any significant part of Judah from Hebron, it's not in the center. And after David leaves, the Bible hardly mentions Hebron again."

The city continued to haunt David, though. David's plans to expand his holdings were almost derailed by his rebellious son, Absalom, who chose Hebron as the place to attempt a coup. There is a story in Second Book of Samuel in which Absalom comes to his father and asks for permission to go to pray in Hebron. David gives him his blessing, telling him, "Go in peace." But Absalom has other plans and once in Hebron foments rebellion against his own father. "As soon as ye hear the sound of the horn, then ye shall say: 'Absalom is king in Hebron,'" he tells his followers, whom he places as spies throughout David's kingdom. Absalom's rebellion is eventually defeated and Absalom killed, but not before he forces David out of Jerusalem and nearly takes over the kingdom. Ofer thought it likely that Hebron's economic and demographic decline after the capital moved to Jerusalem had led to bitterness and resentment among many of the city's residents, who gave Absalom the support he needed to oppose Jerusalem politically.

From the biblical texts as well as administrative records, it became apparent that Hebron had been treated differently by the central authorities. Its tax and population records were listed separately from those of Jerusalem, under whose jurisdictional umbrella it technically fell. To Ofer, this fact seemed to indicate that Hebron had a unique character, that its people saw themselves as both part of the larger Judean entity and somehow separate from it. Ofer could speculate about why that was the case. The cultic material he found indicated Hebron was a self-contained religious center, with its people not dependent on traveling to Jerusalem to worship. That meant that they did not have to pay tribute to the priests in Jerusalem or follow their line of preaching. The lack of any sort of flourishing local agriculture,combined with the city's remote location, must also have resulted in a particular kind of personality being able to thrive there, Ofer theorized.

Little seems to have changed in modern Hebron, with its hard-scrabble existence and residents bent on conflict rather than compromise. Its sad, difficult history hangs over the city. And yet within the city's past lies also potential salvation. Unlike in Jerusalem, where David managed to establish a strong political dynasty that continued for many generations after his death, no one group in Hebron has ever been able to control the city for any length of time. Life there was difficult and the winds of fortune were particularly capricious. "Its residents would stay as long as they could," said Ofer. Then they would move on, relocating to nearby communities when ecological or political circumstances changed, waiting for a chance to return.

Archaeology has enabled a more complete reconstruction of Hebron's development, but textual criticism of the patriarchal narratives reveals something unexpected: Abraham's association with Hebron is not an original part of the patriarchal tradition, but was added at a later date in order to reflect changing political circumstances inside Judah. It is widely accepted among Bible scholars that the composition of the Bible was an ongoing process that took place over the course of several centuries, and many of its stories underwent considerable alteration from the time they were first written down to the time the editing of the Old Testament works was under way, probably in the fifth century B.C.E. Many examples of this abound. The Bible scholar Kyle McCarter Jr. has argued that the twelve tribes of Israel who appear in the stories about Jacob and Joseph that we now read in the Bible represent the tribal list as it stood at a later point in the editing process. As proof, he cites a passage recorded in the Book of Judges describing the victory of the Israelite tribes over a Canaanite foe. This passage contains a different list, one that doesn't mention the southern tribes of Judah and Simeon. McCarter speculates that this discrepancy indicates that when this text was written southern Canaan, which later writers would associate with Abraham himself, was not yet considered part of the territories of Israel and therefore remained outside the list.

In the earlier versions of the stories, Abraham is reported to have settled in the Jezreel Valley, in north-central Israel, and his nephew Lot in Transjordan, while Hagar, Sarah's handmaid and the mother of Abraham's son Ishmael, is associated with a tribe located in northern Arabia. But when the tribe of Judah under David later became the dominant force in Israel, its scribes assumed responsibility for the editing of the Scriptures. They subsequently revised these traditions, McCarter argues, so that in later versions Abraham, along with the rest of the family, was relocated south, to the Judean hills. When Abraham parts from Lot he settles not in the central highlands area, but near the oaks of Mamre in Hebron. He pays the 400 shekels to Ephron in order to buy the family burial plot there too.

Although there is a fairly broad consensus that Abraham's association with Hebron was a later addition to Scripture, exactly how late is still a matter for debate. McCarter suggests that the stories were modified in part out of political motivations, in order to reflect the way the writers viewed matters when King David was in power, in the tenth century B.C.E. But other Bible scholars have staked out even later dates for the final shape of the Abraham traditions, perhaps after the fall of Israel to the Assyrian army in 722 b.c.e. and the subsequent rise of the Judean monarchy and its attempt to create a pan-Israelite national identity. One of the most interesting theories about the dating of the Abraham story has been proposed by Oded Lipschits, a young historian working at Tel Aviv University and specializing in the so-called Babylonian Captivity, the fifty-year period of Babylonian rule in Palestine, beginning with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 587/586 B.C.E.

Lipschits believes that many of the geographic and other references in the Abraham narrative argue for its having been composed during the Babylonian period, and that the story of Abraham's buying a burial plot and land in Hebron had a specific political function. "Hebron had been a traditional center of the Judeans, one of the capitals of Judah, and an important city. But at the time the Judeans started to move back to Jerusalem from the exile in Babylonia, Hebron was no longer part of Judah," he says. "The Babylonians had changed the borders when they took over, and the Persians retained these same borders when they took over from the Babylonians. So the Bible's writers and editors shaped the story to show that Hebron belonged to the Judeans, despite the fact that they didn't control it anymore. They were establishing a claim in case political circumstances changed in the future."

The folk traditions associated with the cave continued to evolve even into the Second Temple period. Jewish sages of the second century B.C.E. wrote that not just Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah were buried in Abraham's tomb, but all of Jacob's sons as well. The sages also added some biblical characters whose tombs were not associated with Hebron by earlier tradition, including Moses and his brother Aaron, according to research by historian Steven Fine. One rabbi reported having seen Adam wandering in Abraham's tomb during a visit to the site. Eventually, Fine argues, the cave became a kind of national burial ground for all biblical heroes.

These legends are of little interest to Hebron's mayor, Mustafa Abdel Nabi Natsheh. "This has always been an Arab city," he says, dismissing the subject. Just as Jewish ties to the city are ignored by Hebron's Muslim community, so is the last seven hundred years of Muslim rule there by the Jewish settlers. "And the title to the field and the cave in it was made over to Abraham," David Wilder, the spokesman for the Jewish community living in Hebron counters. The biblical quotation, stamped on the back of commemorative coins the settlers sell along with other Abraham-related products to support the Jewish community, is often cited to explain why fifty or so families who depend on the protection of Israeli soldiers in order to live amidst 120,000 Arabs will never leave the city. But even the architectural changes at the Tomb of the Patriarchs over the centuries make a mockery of both sides' claims. Each of Hebron's conquerors and religions has added to the structure, which has become a reflection of the competing traditions that have grown up around Abraham over the years. No one is certain who built the original monument that now houses the tomb, although it is usually attributed to the Jewish king Herod the Great (ruled 37-4 B.C.E.) himself. The building was constructed at some point during the thirty- or forty-year period when the Herodian style of architecture was prevalent, most likely on top of some earlier structure traditionally associated with the site of Abraham's burial. Today the site is a crazy quilt of different styles. There are huge Herodian-style walls, with the well-carved ashlar masonry common in Jerusalem. The Romans built a church over the cave, and when the Arabs conquered Hebron in 638 C.E., they converted the church into a mosque. In the twelfth century, Crusaders captured the city and turned the mosque back into a church, until the Mamluks, who were Muslims, retook Hebron, made the church a mosque, and for good measure prohibited Jews and Christians from entering either the sanctuary or the cave. Non-Muslim worshippers were prohibited from ascending any higher than the seventh step on the external staircase leading to the tomb, from where they could look through a hole in the wall over the entrance to the cave.

Jutting out from the enclosure below one of several minarets erected on the building by Saladin is a domed mosque. The Bible records that Joseph's remains were taken from Egypt when Moses and the Israelites escaped and then buried in Shechem (contemporary Nablus), but later Muslim and Jewish legends state that the bones were buried in the tomb in Hebron. In the tenth century C.E., one story goes, the Muslim caliph sent workers to the tomb to try to clear up the mystery. The workers found a huge boulder, cracked it open, and discovered therein the body of Joseph. The caliph promptly built the domed mosque to mark the site. Saladin, the Muslim conqueror who took the tomb in 1188 C.E. after fighting the Christian Crusaders, added the minarets and the crenellations that can still be seen along the building's rooftop. A Crusader column remains standing next to a marble one erected by the Mamluks, who ruled from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries c.e. The Israelis have also made changes. When they took over Hebron after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, the stairway to the tomb was partly removed and the hole through which Jews and Christians used to stare into the sanctuary since the days of the Mamluks was cemented over. Despite the best efforts of all these competing groups, no one has ever succeeded in completely obliterating the contributions of his predecessors.

The biblical text and the city's recently recovered archaeological history belie the idea that Hebron - or Abraham - can ever belong exclusively to one group. Abraham for one seems to have recognized this and acted accordingly. God gives him a divine promise that all the land of Canaan will be his and that the obligation to obtain this land is absolutely critical. But when Abraham and his nephew Lot realize they can no longer live together in peace, it is Abraham who suggests that they divide the land between them, even offering Lot the chance to choose first which portion he wants. "Let there be no strife, I pray thee....Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me; if thou wilt take the left hand then I will go to the right; or if thou take the right hand, then I will go to the left," Abraham tells Lot in Genesis 13, hardly the words of a man willing to conquer at any cost. Later, when Abraham wants to buy the Cave of the Patriarchs in which to bury Sarah, he presents himself as a sojourner, humbling himself before the locals rather than citing God's promise to him or brandishing his historical and divine rights in the city like a weapon. The Bible records his gesture of humility with these simple words: "Abraham bowed down before the people of the land." It would take another four hundred years or so, much of it spent as slaves in Egypt according to the Bible, before Abraham's descendants would improve their circumstances.

Copyright © 2000 by Amy Dockser Marcus

About the Author

Amy Dockser Marcus joined the Wall Street Journal in 1988 and from 1991 to 1998 was based in Tel Aviv as the newspaper's Middle East correspondent. She is currently a senior special writer in the Journal's Boston bureau.