“070. THE SEPULCHER—GENESIS 24”

The Sepulcher—Genesis 24

The twenty-fourth chapter of Genesis is one of the shortest in the book; yet it is so full of circumstances illustrative of primitive customs and ideas, that every verse in it might form a sufficient theme for one of our daily illustrations. We must, however, be content to point out the general tendency and result of these institutions.

The chapter relates the death of Sarah, and the negotiations of Abraham with the people of the land for a burial place. Sarah died at the encampment at Mamre, near Hebron, at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven years. It is remarkable, that Sarah is the only woman whose complete age, death, and burial are mentioned in the Scripture. This was no doubt partly to confer special honor on the mother of the Hebrew race; but is also necessary, not only to form a proper introduction to the ensuing relation of the purchase of a hereditary burial place, but to inform us that it was vouchsafed to her to live thirty-seven years after having brought forth Isaac at the age of ninety, and to see him grown up to man’s estate.

We first see Abraham mourning for his dead. He leaves his own tent and goes to that of Sarah, and sits upon the ground before the corpse, mourning, and not only mourning, but weeping for her. Some here interpose the remark, that the Hebrew mourning was for seven days, implying that Abraham sat for so many days before the corpse. This is absurd. However long the mourning, the burial of the dead has always taken place very soon in the East, seldom later than the day after dissolution. It was, therefore, with the freshness of his grief still upon him, that Abraham had to consider how his dead should be buried out of his sight. This is a question which is seldom in the East left to be considered in these awful moments. But Abraham was a stranger in Canaan, and had not acquired possession so much as of a sepulcher in the land destined to be his heritage. This possession he had now, in this trying hour, to seek; for both propriety and feeling required that the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac, should not be placed in any but a separate and appropriated family sepulcher, well secured from future application to any other use.

There was in a field near Hebron a cave, which from its name of Machpelah appears to have been double, and on this Abraham had set his mind. It belonged to a person of wealth and distinction among the Hethites (or Hittites), who then occupied Hebron. The most obvious course would, according to our own usage, have been to go to this person and ask him to sell his cave. But our ability to do this with safety, arises from the perfection of the legal securities which may pass privately between man and man. In ancient times, no security was felt, especially in matters connected with the sale and transfer of land, but in publicity and the presence of witnesses. Hence, we see, throughout the Scripture, all transactions of this nature conducted in public, and usually in the gate of the city.

In the absence of buildings devoted to public business, and perhaps at first in the want of such paramount authority in any one magistrate or elder, as justified him in expecting the attendance of the others at his own house, the town-gate was the most natural and obvious place of concourse. Here a sufficiency of witnesses to every transaction could be obtained: here the men whose evidence was required, could attend with the least hindrance, as they passed morning and evening to and from their fields and their labor: and here, at such times, the parties whose presence was especially needed, could be called, as they passed by, without any need of an apparitor. We see an instance of this in the book of Ruth. Boaz goes to the gate, and when the person whom he requires, passes him, he calls to him—“Ho such a one! turn aside, sit down here,” Rth_4:1.

So, now, having this object in view, Abraham proceeds to the gate of the town, at the time that he knew the elders of the place would be there assembled. He was received with attention and respect; and on stating his wish to obtain possession of a burying place, the answer was—“Hear us, my Lord: thou art a mighty prince among us, in the choice of our sepulchers bury thy dead.” They did not seem to understand that he wanted an appropriated sepulcher, and supposed they met his wishes by thus offering him permission to deposit the body of Sarah in any of their own tombs. But this, although a very handsome offer, according to the notions of the East, did not meet the views of Abraham. He, however, courteously acknowledged their civility, by rising from his seat and bowing to the people of the land.

He wanted the cave of Machpelah, and he saw the owner present; but being apparently doubtful that a person in such good circumstances would be willing wholly to alienate a part of his possessions, he does not propose the matter to him directly, but requests the elders that they will intercede with Ephron, that he may sell the cave to him for its full value in silver. Ephron who, if so inclined; could not decently refuse a request thus tendered, by such a man as Abraham, appears, nevertheless, in the eyes of those whom experience has taught to see through the outward shows of eastern character, to have been determined to make the best bargain he could, consistently with the necessity of preserving the appearance of liberality and deference. Abraham wanted only “the cave at the end of the field;” but Ephron, while professing three times in one sentence, to make the whole a free gift to Abraham, takes care to intimate, that he will be expected to take not only the cave, but the field in which it stood, probably in the feeling that the value of the field to him would be deteriorated by the presence in it of a sepulcher belonging to another. But Abraham understands this show of boundless generosity very well: and he could not but know that the acquisition would cost him dear, if he consented to accept it as a present, and lay himself under the obligation of meeting the future expectations of Ephron, as to a suitable return of the favor. Besides, the proud independence of the man who refused to allow the king of Sodom the shadow of a ground for saying that he had made Abraham rich, would assuredly prevent him, in any case, from accepting a favor of this sort from any inhabitant of Canaan. He rose, and bowed himself once more, not to Ephron, “but to the people of the land.” But his words were addressed to Ephron, and without objecting to the inclusion of the field in the bargain, he insisted on paying the full price for the whole property.

Nothing now remained but for Ephron to name the value, which he does with all the polite artifice of a modern Oriental; for his words virtually amount to this: “Why should friends and wealthy men like us, use many words about a piece of land worth only four hundred shekels of silver? Note: About fifty pounds.] Bury thy dead, and thou canst pay me this trifle hereafter.” But having got him to name his price, Abraham at once paid down the money in the presence of the witnesses, Ephron’s own countrymen; thus securing the purchase beyond all question.

In the record of this concluding part of the transaction, we are told that “Abraham weighed to Ephron …. four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.” In these few words several important facts meet our notice—that silver had become the standard of value and the medium of exchange; but not yet, perhaps, absolutely to the exclusion of other but less perfect mediums; for Abraham clearly states (as in the original) his intention to pay the full value in silver, as an advantage to the party of whom he makes the purchase. That which silver had thus already become, it remains throughout the Scripture—for gold was never in ancient times more than a costly commodity, not the standard of value; and, indeed, it is not such at this day in scarcely any country but our own. Other countries may have some small proportion of coins in gold, but the bulk of the currency is in silver, and silver only is the standard of value.

The next point that engages our notice is, that the silver was weighed. How does this consist with its being “current money with the merchant?” If it were current money, what need of its being weighed? That it was weighed at all, would suggest to most minds that it was not coined money—and various considerations would seem to show that it was not. Among these circumstances we do not, however, count the absence of any central authority—in Canaan, for instance—whose stamp should give authenticity to the coin; because if such a power existed anywhere, in Assyria or in Egypt, the coins of that power would doubtless circulate beyond the limits of its own territory, just as Spanish dollars are at this day current over nearly all the world. The probabilities are that the silver was cast into forms convenient for commercial interchanges, and these receiving some mark or stamp which showed that the metal was of the commercial standard of purity, became current money with the merchant—the quantity being still determined by weighing. It is even possible that the mere shape of these pieces of silver was taken to determine the purity of the metal; and that shape may have been in rings, which appears from the monuments to have been the earliest form of money among the ancient Egyptians.

But although it seems to us probable that money was not in this early age properly coined, the fact of the silver being weighed is by no means conclusive evidence against its being so. At this day coined money is weighed in all the markets of the East; and even among ourselves, when any of our readers has had occasion to receive a sum in gold at the Bank of England, he will have had the sovereigns weighed out to him in bulk. In the latter case this is merely to save time, counting being a much slower process than weighing. But a saving of time is the last thing ever thought of in the East; and the weighing there of coined money is to secure that the pieces shall be of just weight. This point is admirably illustrated in an anecdote given by Mr. Fordyce. Before the time of Lord Cornwallis, the silver rupee, for example, in Bengal, was of considerable thickness, and bore a stamp on each side; but it was not stamped, or, as it is called, “milled,” around the edges. Hence it could be easily pared or cut in the edges, so that the ordinary rupees were not all of one weight, in consequence of fraudulent operations on them. The stamp showed the purity of the metal, so as to render it current coin; but not being milled or stamped around the edges, it was necessary to weigh it, in order to ascertain that the proper weight in silver was delivered. Lord Cornwallis, when governor-general, put an end to this inconvenient kind of money, by establishing a mint at Calcutta, in which thin pieces milled round the edges were coined, in order to ascertain, as with us, both the quality and quantity of the coin, and so to supersede the necessity of weighing the money. We doubt if this simple contrivance has even yet, in the East, extended beyond India. Some of the most valuable eastern coins, in gold and silver, that we were a few years ago in the habit of seeing daily, had scarcely any edge at all, but exhibited irregular masses of metal around the border, dropping beyond the margin of the impression made by the die, in such excrescent shapes, as absolutely to suggest the idea of clipping, as an improvement to the figure of the coin.

Autor: JOHN KITTO