c. 1996 Religion News Service

HEBRON, West Bank _ Thousands of years after the biblical patriarch Abraham purchased a family burial ground in this ancient Canaanite town, the”Cave of Machpelah”_ or”Cave of the Patriarchs”as it is often called _ is probably the world’s most bitterly disputed cemetery. It is also the religious soul of the modern-day Israeli-Arab battle for control of Hebron.

Jewish claims on the cemetery, and the Jewish homes and synagogues clustered near the site, have made the ongoing negotiations over a partial withdrawal from Hebron a loaded political and religious issue for Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet if Abraham were alive today, he might be shocked and dismayed over the violent Jewish-Muslim political debate over the graveyard, which he purchased from the pagan, Canaanite residents of Hebron in what the Bible describes as a model of peaceful exchange between peoples of different faiths:”And Abraham bowed himself down before the people of the land … saying … `I pray thee, I will give thee the price of the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there …'”read the verses in the Book of Genesis.”And Ephron answered Abraham, saying to him, `My lord, hearken to me: a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that between me and thee? Bury therefore thy dead.'” Tradition says Sarah and Abraham are buried in this place (“Machpelah”is an obscure Hebrew word for”pairs”). Their son Isaac and his wife, Rebecca, are believed buried there, along with their son Jacob and one of his wives, Leah. The cemetery was the first land purchased by the nomadic Hebrew tribes in the land God had promised to Abraham’s descendants.

Hebron is thus regarded as the second most important city to Jews after Jerusalem. Since biblical times, Jewish communities have lived in the shadow of the cave, and pious Jews have made pilgrimages to the site.

Yet Muslim Arabs also see themselves as heirs to Abraham’s legacy. They trace their lineage to Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, who was born of Sarah’s Egyptian servant Hagar. As latter-day descendants of Ishmael, Muslims also claim the Machpelah burial ground, which they call Abraham’s Mosque.

Both the Bible and Islamic traditions suggest that Abraham’s first link to Hebron was not only the result of divine direction, but also part of a broader process that took place in early nomadic civilization.”In human history, one of the most basic features of the transition from nomadic to sedentary life was the identification of a burial place,”says Ze’ev Yavin, an Israeli archaeologist who has explored the Machpelah site.”The Cave of Machpelah was part of the settlement process of the nomadic Hebrew tribes.” Islamic tradition, in contrast, placed greater emphasis on Abraham’s Bedouin-style wanderings.

As a shepherd who roamed the Negev Desert region around Beersheva, Abraham probably traveled north to the Hebron highlands to find relief from summer heat. There he camped as a”respected guest”of the local Canaanite rulers, returning south in the winter, says Yunis Amr, a Palestinian professor of ancient Semitic languages who wrote a book on Abraham’s Mosque.

After Sarah died and was buried in Hebron, Abraham’s connection naturally deepened and he”began to come to the town from time to time to visit the holy grave.”Still,”Abraham came as a guest, not with a gun”adds Amr, referring to the weapons of present-day Jewish settlers. “And the field of Efron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field and the cave which was in it, and all the trees that were in the field … were made over to Abraham for a possession,”says Genesis.

Today, this once pastoral field sits in the heart of Arab Hebron. About 400 Jews have moved into homes in the immediate area, creating a thorny security problem for Israel as it withdraws troops from the town.

The focus of their religious fervor is the Cave of Machpelah, now covered by a massive stone-faced structure, probably built in the first century A.D. by the Roman-appointed King Herod. Herod, a Jew appointed by the Romans to rule a captive people, sought to curry favor with the local population with a series of building projects, including the expansion of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans.

But Hebron’s Herodian structure has survived almost intact. Inside the original walls, a rectangular basilica has been used over the centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and prayer, renovated by a succession of Byzantine Christian and Muslim rulers.

The large mosque that now dominates the interior of the building is an impressive example of medieval Muslim art and architecture, with its pastel- and gold-painted ceilings and an elaborately carved wood pulpit, or minbar.

In 1980, the mosque’s Islamic caretakers allowed Yavin a rare glimpse at the legendary subterranean chambers hidden below the visible Herodian structure _ chambers from which Jews and Christians had been barred for centuries.

Descending from a hidden opening in the stone floor of the mosque, he followed a corridor to a room. Below the room were two man-made caves typical of burial sites from the Middle Bronze Age between 1,800 and 2,000 B.C. _ the period corresponding roughly to the time when Abraham was believed to have lived.

In one cave, Yavin recovered glass candlesticks and a ceramic jug dating to the Crusader era. A second, smaller cave contained pottery fragments dating to the early Israelite period, or Iron Age, of 900 B.C.

The archaeological findings, together with historical descriptions of the site, make it”clear there was a tradition of Jewish pilgrimage to it from a very early era,”says Yavin.

One of the most remarkable observations was that of the European Christian pilgrim Antoninos the Martyr in 586 A.D. He reported that”in the middle of the Cave of Machpelah there is a basilica of four pillars. From one side, the Christians enter and from the other side, the Jews … and there gather a multitude of Jews from all over the country.” The Islamic conquest of Hebron in 638 A.D., however, was the catalyst for the gradual Islamic sanctification of the site, and the surrounding city.

In Arabic, Hebron came to be known as Al Khalil, meaning”friend of God”_ a biblically based nickname for Abraham. Islamic religious writers began to describe the town as a way station on the prophet Mohammed’s mystical night journey to Jerusalem, the place where Muslim tradition reports that he ascended into heaven.

Hebron, meanwhile, became an important stop for Muslim pilgrims making the hajj to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, located in modern-day Saudi Arabia.

In memory of Abraham’s legacy of generosity to strangers, the town’s medieval Muslim leaders distributed a daily meal of lentils to all local residents and visitors _ a unique and massive undertaking that persisted for centuries.

While popular Islam first saw the patriarch’s tombs as a site for miracles and supplication, Hebron gradually evolved into a center of serious Islamic study and mystical Sufi practice. Out of the pious population emerged the more militant groups of Islamic fundamentalists, who have opposed the post-1967 Jewish settlement drive in the town.

Despite the bitter present-day tensions, there have been times in history when Jews and Muslims viewed each other as allies against alien Christian rulers.

Jews were thus reputed to have welcomed the first Muslim Arab conquest in 638 A.D. as a relief from the harsh Byzantine Christian rule. And in exchange for leading the Caliph Omar to the opening of the cave, they were granted permission to build a synagogue in the courtyard of the structure.

Yet through the ebb and flow of Crusader conquest and Muslim reconquest, Jewish access was progressively restricted. In 1266, Jews were banned from entering the Cave by Muslim Mameluke rulers _ a restriction that persisted until Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank.

In 1929, as Arab nationalists rallied against the rapidly increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine, 67 Hebron Jews were murdered in a pogrom, and the remainder of the 700-strong Jewish community was evacuated, ending centuries of almost continuous Jewish settlement in the city.

The Jewish presence was revived by religious nationalist Jewish settlers in 1967, who renovated and resettled former Jewish community properties. They were met with stiff resistance, however, by the local Arab population, who resented the new settlers’ aggressive political ideology.

Tensions peaked in February 1994 when a prominent Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, massacred more than 30 Arab Muslim worshipers as they prostrated themselves for dawn prayers inside Abraham’s Mosque. Following the massacre, the various courtyards and sanctuaries on the site have been strictly divided between Muslims and Jews _ a partition bitterly opposed by both sides.

Now, as Israel prepares to undergo a partial redeployment of troops in the town, the struggle between Jews and Muslims over prayer rights in the holy site is likely to intensify.

Following the redeployment, Israel is likely to retain security control over the Cave of the Patriarchs and surrounding areas. But Palestinians are expected to hold civilian power.

Within three months, negotiations are set to begin on prayer arrangements _ but the conflicting claims to worship rights remain at the crux of an almost irreconcilable conflict that will certainly intensify in the new situation.

On the one hand, Arabs charge that Jews have gradually expanded their own public worship in the cave _ encroaching on Muslim ceremonies and rituals. Even the most liberal Muslims adamantly claim that prayer rights in the site should belong exclusively to them. “God said to us his religion is Islam. Anyone who comes with another religion is refused,”says Amr, asserting that Jews should be allowed to visit, but not to pray publicly in the holy site.

Most Jews, naturally, reject claims of Muslim exclusivity over a burial ground that has been a part of Jewish thinking and lore since the chapter of Genesis was first written. “We have no objection if everyone in the world will come to pray here. But Jewish rights can’t be curbed,”says Noam Arnon, a leader of the settler community and an expert on the Cave of Machpelah.

Still, some Orthodox Jews are also disturbed by the gradual expansion of public worship activities and religious celebrations in what is essentially a burial ground. They suggest that limits on such activities by both sides could form the basis for a dialogue on religious compromise.”Judaism,”says Orthodox Rabbi Ze’ev Gotthold,”honors the body as the seat of the soul,”but forbids the use of a graveyard as a synagogue out of respect for the dead who cannot join in the public worship.

Gotthold, who has studied Jewish attitudes on holy places, says that”the ancient pilgrims used to go to the Cave of Machpelah for meditation”_ and modern-day worship by Jews and Muslims should be similarly limited.”The current dispute is man-centered rather than God-centered. It’s an example of God serving man, rather than man serving God,”he says.

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Still, in an era when both Jewish and Islamic religious radicalism are on the rise, finding creative religious solutions is a formidable task.

And Hebron’s Jewish settlers, who have been in the vanguard of expanding worship in the site, defend their practice with sayings and legends from a rich Jewish mystical tradition. That tradition saw the Cave of Machpelah not as a mere grave, but as a supernatural connection between everyday mortals and the afterlife. “This is not a regular graveyard where the dead merely lie,”says Arnon.”And those who are buried there are not dead in the usual sense. Jewish tradition describes the cave as an `opening to paradise.’ According to the tradition, the patriarchs are merely `sleeping’ in Hebron.”

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