Our weekly portion of Bible Study on Saturday Morning was about Sarah who had just died and Abraham’s need to find a burial place for her.  The Bible recounts that he bought a site, the Cave of Machpelah, owned by Ephron the Hittite.  There are other mentions of Hittites later in Genesis that says two of Esau’s wives were called Hittites. These “children of Heth” are mentioned in other ancient texts but it seems that the Hittites were pre-literate in that they left no accounts written by them.

The Hittites may have sprung from Anatolia which is in Turkey and spread to threaten and overcome the Babylonians and the Egyptians.  There were pitched battles, the most famous of which was at Kadesh, fought on the banks of the Orontes River in Syria, but most students of the Hittites believe they were an energetic and inventive people (the first to deal with iron and chariots) who in a wave of movement restlessly invaded more “civilized” and interesting areas.

The interesting thing to me is that Abraham, a big herdsman of his time and well known for his interesting idea about ONE God, was able to conduct a sensible and fair negotiation for the Cave at Machpelah that would from this time forward belong to the family of Abraham.  Sarah was buried here and later so were Abraham and his sons and sons’ sons.  Today, the property is within the city of Hebron and is controlled by “Palestinians”.  It is part of the partitioned land that was awarded by the United Nations in 1948. Because of the escalated war between the two peoples, Jews are not welcome to go there to pay their respects.

But, what this is about is the honor that is due to Ephron.  Abraham was a stranger passing through (explained as a forerunner of a wave of Semitic peoples who were entering the strip of land along side of the Mediterranean that was the connecting link between the two ends of the Fertile Crescent).  He had the status of a resident alien and was asking for the favor of owning a piece of land in perpetuity in which to bury his family. Ephron honored Abraham by granting his entreaty.

The interesting thing is that the negotiations were concluded by Abraham paying a good sum (400 silver shekels), more than a fair price, and no one until today has interfered with that legal transaction.  Ephron was an honorable man and some of his racial co-inhabitants of this land married within the Jewish community.  The last mention of Hittites was made by Ezra on his return from Babylonian captivity. These Hittites stayed when the Anatolian power had disintegrated and soon a new wave of “Sea Peoples”, perhaps the Phoenicians, entered the country. And thus history is explained – maybe.