c. 1996 Religion News Service

“And Sarah died in Qiryat Arba, that is Hebron, in the land of Canaan … and Abraham stood up from before his dead and spoke to the sons of Het, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying place with you that I may bury my dead.”Genesis 23: 1-5

HEBRON, West Bank (RNS)-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-and the religious soul of the modern-day Israeli-Arab battle for control of Hebron.

It is Jewish claims on the cemetery, and the Jewish homes and synagogues clustered near the site, which have made the Israeli decision on whether to withdraw partially from Hebron such a loaded political and religious issue for newly elected 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 …'”according to Genesis 23:12-16.”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”). The couple’s son Isaac and his wife, Rebecca, are believed buried there, along with their grandson Jacob and one of his wives, Leah. The cemetery was the first land acquisition by the nomadic Hebrew tribes in the land God had promised to Abraham’s descendants.

As a result, Hebron is regarded as the second most important city to Jews after Jerusalem. Jewish communities have lived in the shadow of the Cave, and pious Jews have made pilgrimages to the site, in an almost continuous chain extending back to biblical times.

Yet Muslim Arabs also see themselves as heirs to the Patriarch 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 or Abraham’s Holy Site.

Regardless of the dispute over heritage, 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, on the other hand, continued to place a slightly greater stress 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 regularly in the summertime to find relief from the 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 23:17.

Today, this once pastoral field sits in the heart of Arab Hebron. And the reputed Cave of Machpelah has been covered for centuries by a massive stone-faced structure, probably built in the first century A.D. by the Roman-appointed King Herod.

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Inside the walls, a rectangular basilica has been used over the centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and prayer, and renovated by a succession of Byzantine Christian and Muslim rulers.

The large mosque that now dominates the interior of the Herodian 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, painted in bronze, red, green and gold.

In 1980, with the permission of the mosque’s Islamic caretakers, Yavin was accorded 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.

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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 partitioned between Muslims and Jews-a partition bitterly opposed by both sides.

On a deeper level, differing attitudes toward worship in the Cave of Machpelah remain at the crux of a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Hebron’s 25,000 Muslims and 5,000 Jewish settlers who live in the ancient town and in the new suburb of Kiryat Arba.

Leaders of Hebron’s Jewish settler community such as Noam Arnon, an expert on the Cave of Machpelah, assert that the site should be open for worship to peoples of all faiths. “We have no objection if everyone in the world will come to pray here, without bothering the rights of the Jews,”he says.

But over the past two decades, Jews have gradually expanded public worship de facto-encroaching on Muslim ceremonies and rituals, Arabs claim.

Today, even the most liberal Muslims claim that rights to worship in the site should belong exclusively to them. While Jews can visit, they should not be allowed to pray publicly in what Islam regards exclusively as a mosque, Muslims claim.”God said to us, his religion is Islam, anyone who comes with another religion is refused,”says Amr.”Jews don’t believe in Mohammed. When a Jew comes to pray in the mosque, he may respect it as a holy place, but he does not accept the religious terms.” While most Jews reject such claims of exclusivity, some Orthodox Jews also are disturbed by the gradual expansion of public worship activities in the cave to regular synagogue services and even religious celebrations, a practice they say runs against the grain of Jewish tradition.”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, it is unlikely that either side is looking for creative religious solutions to the dispute.

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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