The Graves That Wait

God promised Abraham a whole land. Abraham walked the length of it, pitched his tent in it, built altars in it, and died without owning it. The only piece of it he ever held with a deed was a grave. His grandson Jacob, dying rich in Egypt, would not be buried there. And his great-grandson Joseph, the second man in the whole Egyptian kingdom, made his family swear to carry his bones out when they left. Three generations of the fathers of Israel put their dead, and their hopes, into the ground of a promise they did not live to see. This letter is about those graves, what can and cannot be said about where they are today, and why the Bible spends so much time on them.

1. The first land was a grave

When Stephen stood before the council in Jerusalem, he summed up Abraham’s life in one strange sentence. God "gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child" (Acts 7:5).

Not so much as a footprint. Then Sarah died. "And Sarah died in Kirjatharba; the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her" (Genesis 23:2). And the man who had been promised everything went to the local people of Hebron and asked to buy a place to bury her. "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight" (Genesis 23:4).

Genesis gives a whole chapter to the bargaining. Ephron the Hittite offered the field as a gift, the way a seller does when he means to name a high price, and then he named it: "the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead" (Genesis 23:15). Abraham did not haggle. "And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant" (Genesis 23:16). Then comes the line the whole chapter was written for: "And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth" (Genesis 23:20).

Why so much detail over a grave? Because it is an act of faith. God had promised the land free, and Abraham paid full price, in front of witnesses, for a small corner of it, so that he could lay his wife in it. He was planting his dead in the promise. The cave was the first title deed of Israel, and it was a tomb.

2. Who was laid there

Abraham was buried there next. "And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre" (Genesis 25:9). Two brothers who had been parted since boyhood stood together at their father’s grave.

Two generations later, Jacob was dying in Egypt, the land that had saved his family from famine. He had every reason to be buried there with honour. He would not. "And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite" (Genesis 49:29). Then he named who was already waiting: "There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah" (Genesis 49:31). And they did as he asked. "For his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the field for a possession of a buryingplace of Ephron the Hittite, before Mamre" (Genesis 50:13).

Six of them, then, in one cave: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah.

3. Joseph’s coffin

Joseph had more of Egypt than any of them. He had been sold there as a slave and raised to rule it. He died there, and still he did not want to stay. "And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob" (Genesis 50:24). "And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence" (Genesis 50:25). "So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt" (Genesis 50:26).

That coffin sat in Egypt for generations. Through the years when a new king arose who did not know Joseph, through the slavery and the brick kilns, it sat there, a box that said to every Israelite who remembered it: we are leaving. And on the night of the Exodus someone remembered. "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you" (Exodus 13:19). They carried him through the sea and through forty years in the wilderness, and at the end of the conquest they laid him down. "And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for an hundred pieces of silver: and it became the inheritance of the children of Joseph" (Joshua 24:32). The story of how Joseph got to Egypt in the first place, and why the church has always seen Christ in him, is on Joseph, Sold by His Brethren.

Stephen, telling the story centuries later, put it this way: "So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem" (Acts 7:15-16). Stephen’s summary joins two burials that Genesis tells separately: Abraham bought the cave at Machpelah from Ephron, and Jacob bought the field at Shechem from the sons of Hamor. Most readers see a sermon compressing the story, not a contradiction in it; the details are laid out on the page about Joseph’s bones.

4. How Hebrews reads it

When the letter to the Hebrews lists the heroes of faith, it could have chosen anything from Joseph’s life: the dreams, the prison, the forgiveness of his brothers. It chose his bones. "By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones" (Hebrews 11:22).

Why that? Because a man’s instructions for his own burial show what he really believes about the future. Joseph believed God would keep the promise even though he would not live to see it, and he arranged his body accordingly. Hebrews says the same of all of them: "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (Hebrews 11:13). And it says what they were really looking for: "But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:16). The chapter ends on the same note, and turns it toward us: "And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect" (Hebrews 11:39-40). Their graves were not the end of the story. They were waiting for something.

5. What the ground can and cannot say

It would be easy to finish here with a picture of the places, and to say: there they are. A fair letter has to be more careful than that.

In Hebron today a great stone enclosure stands over the traditional site of the cave. Its walls are usually attributed to Herod the Great, who reigned from 37 to 4 BC, and the Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century, says the monuments of Abraham and his family were shown at Hebron in his day. The chambers below have never been properly excavated. Pottery taken from a space under the building in 1981 was studied and published in 2020, and dated to the Iron Age, the late ninth and eighth centuries before Christ. No inscription, no burial and no remains have ever been identified with Abraham or his family. The identification rests on tradition that goes back at least to Herod’s time, not on excavation.

At Nablus, near ancient Shechem, a small domed building is known as Joseph’s Tomb. The building itself was rebuilt in 1868. The tradition is much older: a pilgrim from Bordeaux, travelling in AD 333, was shown a tomb of Joseph at Shechem. But there is no archaeological evidence that it is his grave, and the site is disputed. Many Palestinians hold that it is the tomb of an eighteenth-century Muslim holy man, and the building has been attacked and burned more than once. Scholars also divide over how much of the stories of the patriarchs can be checked at all. The full evidence, for and against, is on The Cave of Machpelah and Joseph’s Bones.

None of that takes anything from Genesis. Faith in the promise never depended on a building being the exact spot. Abraham himself owned only the deed, not a monument.

Where this lands

Here is the strange contrast. People still argue, thousands of years on, over which building holds Abraham. They argue over which domed tomb holds Joseph, and some have set one of them on fire. The graves of the fathers are waiting, and men are still fighting over them.

But there is one grave the whole Christian faith rests on, and no one argues over whose bones are in it. There are none. On the first day of the week an angel said to the women: "He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay" (Matthew 28:6).

That is what the fathers were waiting for. When the Sadducees tried to argue that there is no resurrection, Jesus answered them with the very men in the cave at Hebron: "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living" (Matthew 22:32). Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not lost in that cave. God still calls Himself their God. And Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, was told that the bones were the whole house of Israel, saying "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost," and then he heard God answer them: "Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel" (Ezekiel 37:11-12).

Abraham paid for a grave and laid his dead in the promise. Joseph gave orders for his bones because he knew the promise would outlast him. They were right. The promise did not come to them in their lifetime. It came in a garden outside Jerusalem, in a tomb that a rich man had cut for himself and that was found empty. "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept" (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits means the first of a harvest, the sign that the rest is coming. The graves at Hebron and Shechem are still waiting. They are waiting for Him.

Scripture from the King James Version, linked to the Study Bible. Facts about the two sites are those given on The Cave of Machpelah and Joseph’s Bones, with their sources: the 2020 pottery study in the Israel Exploration Journal 70, no. 1, pages 49 to 63; Josephus, Jewish War 4.9.7; the Bordeaux Pilgrim (AD 333); and Eusebius’s Onomasticon. See also Joseph, Sold by His Brethren.