I’ve been married for 53 years come this November 2022. Wow! It seems like a long time. It is a long time to be married to one person, especially by Hollywood standards. But 53 years is really nothing in comparison to Abraham and Sarah’s lifelong marriage. By the time of Sarah’s death in Genesis 23, you can figure that they had been married well over 100 years! Also, it had been over 60 years that they had lived as vagabonds in the land that God had promised to give them. They were soul mates. They went through it all together, hand in hand, for over a century. They traveled together from Ur to Haran, from Haran to Canaan, from Canaan to Egypt and back again. They had shared it all, the ups and the downs. She had put up with Abraham’s failures, even when he made her an accomplice in his sin. Of course she was the principal character in her own failures as well.

Good news for all women. Sarah wasn’t perfect and yet she too, like Abraham, is called righteous. She was Abraham’s soul mate. The woman who gave the most precious gift possible, his one and only son, Isaac. Isaac’s name means “Laughter.” Sarah is the mother of “laughter.” She was buried in the heart of the Promised Land. The purchase of Machpelah, her burial site, marks the beginning of Israel’s ownership of the Promised Land. When Abraham dies, he too will be buried with her in the middle of the Promised Land. Although they were both sinners in their own rights they ended up in the center of the place where God wanted them.

Genesis 23:19 says, “Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah east of Mamre (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan.” Machpelah is the place. Guzik gives us a little history of the place. “This is where Isaac and Ishmael buried Abraham (Genesis 25:9). Isaac and Rebekah were both buried here (Genesis 49:31). Jacob buried Leah here (Genesis 49:31), and Joseph buried Jacob here (Genesis 50:13). The cave of Machpelah (near Hebron) was the great tomb of the Patriarchs.”1

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the tomb of the Patriarchs. You might be interested. This is it without the footnotes and pictures.

Over the cave stands a large rectangular enclosure dating from the Herodian era. During Byzantine rule of the region, a basilica was built on the site; the structure was converted into the Ibrahimi Mosque following the Muslim conquest of the Levant. By the 12th century, the mosque and its surrounding regions had fallen under crusader-state control, but were retaken in 1188 by the Ayyubid sultan Saladin, who again converted the structure into a mosque. During the Six-Day War of 1967, the entire Jordanian-occupied West Bank was seized and occupied by the State of Israel, after which the structure was divided into a synagogue and a mosque. In 1994, the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre occurred at the Ibrahimi Mosque, in which an armed Israeli settler entered the complex on the Jewish holiday of Purim—which had occurred during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan—and opened fire on Palestinian Muslims who had gathered to pray at the site, killing 29 people, including children, and wounding over 125. The site is considered to be the second-holiest place in Judaism after the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.

1 David Guzik, Genesis, David Guzik’s Commentaries on the Bible (Santa Barbara, CA: David Guzik, 2013), Ge 23:17–20.