Hebron and Mamre

The visitors

Amitai (Tai) Elon

Anchor: Genesis 18:1-15. World English Bible, public domain. Supporting passages are identified separately below.

Where we are

Hebron sits high. At around nine hundred metres it is one of the highest towns in the Judean hills, higher than Jerusalem, and in the afternoon the light comes in flat and hot across terraces of vines and stone. The old city gathers round a single enormous building, the Herodian enclosure over the Cave of Machpelah, which Jews call Me'arat HaMachpela and Muslims the Ibrahimi Mosque. Its walls are the same style of drafted stone as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and they have stood for two thousand years.^hebron

Mamre is not Hebron. It lies about three kilometres north, at a place the Arabs call Ramat el-Khalil, "the height of the Friend," the Friend being Abraham. There, too, Herod built an enclosure, and later Constantine put a church inside it. Today it is a fenced ruin of large stones beside a road, with a well in one corner. Whether the oaks of Mamre stood exactly here is tradition, not proof, but the tradition is old, and Josephus already knew a great terebinth near Hebron that people said was as old as the world.^mamre

So there are two places in this chapter, and the text keeps them distinct. Abraham camps by the oaks of Mamre. Hebron is the city nearby. The anchor passage happens at the tent door, not in the city, and I want us to sit down at that door, in the heat of the day, when nobody sensible travels.

What happened, in order

Much has happened since Shechem. Abram has been to Egypt and back. He and Lot have parted, Lot choosing the plain of the Jordan and Abram settling by the oaks of Mamre in Hebron, where he built an altar, in Genesis 13:18. God has made a covenant with him, in chapter 15, and then, in chapter 17, changed his name to Abraham and Sarai's to Sarah, promised a son by Sarah within the year, and given circumcision as the sign. Abraham laughed at that promise, face down, and asked that Ishmael might live before God instead. All of this is supporting context.

Now the anchor. Yahweh appears to him at Mamre. What Abraham sees is three men. He runs, bows, and begs them to stay for a little water and a morsel of bread. They agree. He then produces, at speed, a feast: cakes from a great quantity of fine flour, a calf, curds and milk. He stands while they eat.

They ask where Sarah is. One of them, whom the text now calls Yahweh, says he will return at this time next year and Sarah will have a son. Sarah, listening at the tent door behind him, laughs to herself. The text is blunt about why: they are both old, and she is past childbearing. Yahweh asks Abraham why Sarah laughed, and then puts the question that holds the chapter: is anything too hard for Yahweh? Sarah, afraid, says she did not laugh. He answers: no, but you did laugh.

The visitors then rise and look towards Sodom, and the rest of chapter 18 is Abraham walking with them and bargaining for the city. That is the next stop. Here we stay at the door.

What they were after, and the turn

Abraham wanted guests. That sounds small until you have lived in a place where hospitality is the measure of a man. He does not know yet who these three are. He runs to strangers in the worst heat of the day and offers them the least he can name, water and a morsel, then gives them the most he has. Anyone who has sat as a guest in a Bedouin tent in the Negev knows the pattern: understate the offer, then kill the animal. It is not deceit. It is honour.

Sarah wanted, I think, to stop hoping. Read her laugh carefully. It is not mockery of God; she does not know God is at the door. It is the private laugh of a woman who has heard this promise before, through her husband, and has watched thirteen years pass since Ishmael was born to her servant. "After I have grown old, will I have pleasure?" That is not unbelief so much as tiredness.

The turn is the question, is anything too hard for Yahweh, and then the small, strange exchange that follows. Sarah denies the laugh. God does not let her. "No, but you did laugh." I used to read that as a rebuke. I no longer do. God does not punish the laugh; he refuses the lie about it. He would rather have her honest laughter than her frightened denial. And the child, when he comes, will be called Isaac, "he laughs," so that the laugh is folded into the promise rather than held against her. That is Genesis 21:6, where Sarah says God has made her laugh, and it is supporting context.

Abraham's turn is quieter. In chapter 17 he laughed and offered Ishmael as a substitute. Here he says nothing at all when the promise is repeated. He has stopped arguing. He stands, and serves, and listens.

The Eastern lens

A Western reader sees a generous old man being kind. An Eastern reader sees a patriarch running, which a man of standing does not do, bowing to the ground before strangers, and calling himself their servant. The whole scene is Abraham lowering himself below people he does not know, and the text lets us watch God accept the lowering. Then there is the tent door. Sarah is behind him, inside, where a woman of the household belongs when male guests are present, and yet the visitor asks for her by name and speaks the promise loud enough for her to hear. He is not talking to Abraham about Sarah. He is talking to Sarah through the wall. In a culture where the woman is not addressed, that is the tender centre of the passage.^honour

Look for him

The letter to the Hebrews tells its readers not to forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some have entertained angels without knowing it. Most readers since have heard Mamre in that line, Hebrews 13:2, though the text does not name Abraham. Paul in Romans 4:19-21 holds up Abraham here as the man who considered his own body as good as dead and Sarah's womb as dead, and did not waver. And when the angel tells Mary in Luke 1:37 that nothing is impossible with God, the Greek echoes the old Greek translation of "is anything too hard for Yahweh." I offer these as the apostles' readings, held honestly: they saw in the promise to a barren woman the shape of a later promise to a virgin.

The later story of this ground

Hebron carries more of the Bible than almost any city. Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite to bury Sarah, in chapter 23, and is buried there himself, with Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah following. Caleb is given Hebron as his inheritance in Joshua 14. David is anointed king of Judah here and reigns seven years and six months from Hebron before taking Jerusalem, in 2 Samuel 2 and 5. Absalom starts his revolt from Hebron in 2 Samuel 15. Mamre returns only as a landmark for the cave, in Genesis 49:30 and 50:13, after Jacob comes home to Isaac there in 35:27, but the tradition of Abraham's tree drew pilgrims and a fair for a thousand years.

Where the writer stood

The same answer as the earlier chapters: tradition says Moses, scholarship says a long process of composition, and I say we do not know the hand. The writer stood in the Land, at a distance from the events, telling a story in which God's name is known and the visitors are only slowly recognised. The recognition is written into the grammar: three men, then "he," then Yahweh.^hayes

What is contested

The identity of the three. Christian readers from the early centuries onward saw the Trinity in three visitors, and the Russian icon by Rublev fixed that reading in art. The text itself says Yahweh appeared and Abraham saw three men; in the next chapter, two of them are called angels and go on to Sodom while Yahweh remains with Abraham. Jewish tradition reads three angels with distinct missions. I read what the text says and no more.

The site of Mamre. Ramat el-Khalil is the strongest candidate, with Herodian and Constantinian remains, but there is a second tradition at the "Oak of Abraham" in the grounds of the Russian Orthodox monastery to the west of Hebron, where a very old, now dead, oak was shown to pilgrims. Neither can be tied to Abraham's actual tent.

The cave. The Herodian enclosure covers a cave that has been entered only a handful of times in recorded history. The tombs shown to visitors are medieval cenotaphs above it. The burials of the patriarchs cannot be verified, and I do not claim otherwise.^hebron

Standing here today

Hebron is a divided city, and I will not pretend it is easy ground. The Cave of the Patriarchs is shared between a mosque and a synagogue, with separate entrances, and visiting hours change with the calendar of both faiths. Ramat el-Khalil, the traditional Mamre, sits beside the road north of the city and is usually quiet. Before you go, check the current arrangements; they are not the same from one month to the next.

What I can promise is this. When you stand in the enclosure, the stones you touch were laid by the same builders who laid the Western Wall. And when you stand on the height at Mamre and look south towards the city, you are somewhere very close to where an old man ran to strangers.

I do not know what promise you have stopped hoping for. Sarah's laugh is in this book for you. God did not need her to believe before he came to the door. He needed her to be there, and to be honest about the laugh.

A prayer from this stop

God of Abraham and Sarah, come to our tent door in the heat of the day. Teach us to run to strangers and to give more than we offered. Where we have laughed at your promise, forgive the laugh and keep the promise. Where we have denied the laugh, give us the courage to own it. And let nothing be too hard for you in our house this year.

Illustration

Licensed public photo: the Herodian enclosure at Hebron from the north, or the stone enclosure at Ramat el-Khalil. If neither can be licensed, a studio plate of a tent under oaks in flat afternoon light, labelled as an illustration.

Source notes