Genesis 23

Wow, thanks Don.
I’m going to pay more attention to what’s happening in my own backyard.
We would have done that.
Yeah. Probably or likely would have done that.
Okay.
Well, thanks for being with us friends.
We are continuing in the Abraham story,
actually getting closer to the end
of the Abraham story as both he and Sarah are aging.
Isaac is now on the scene and the story
will shift largely to Isaac
in the next chapter.
But today we have an entire chapter,
I would say devoted to the death of Sarah,
Michael, but really most of the chapter has to do with Abraham and the funeral arrangements.
And rather than read this,
this is long, but I’ll read a couple verses
and then we can tell you the story of the rest of what happened.
So we’re in chapter 23 here.
Sarah lived 127 years.
This was the length of Sarah’s life and Sarah died at Kirabartha, no,
sorry,
Kiratharba, that is Hebron in the land of Canaan.
And Abraham went to mourn for Sarah
and to weep for her.
Abraham rose up from beside the dead and said to the Hittites,
I am a stranger,
an alien residing among you.
Give me property among you for a burying place
so that I might bury my dead out of my sight.
So a couple of interesting things here before we get
into kind of the rest of the story.
The most interesting thing that has been made of this
story is that it seems to indicate for some portion of
Abraham and Sarah’s life,
they may have been
residing in different places.
Sarah is in this place,
Hebron, and as we last
left the story of Abraham,
remember that he lived in Beersheba.
And there are those who have read into that the
possibility that this episode with Isaac,
where Abraham took Isaac and was willing to sacrifice him,
may have
put a wedge between them.
It may have been that Sarah simply couldn’t be where Abraham was anymore.
Now,
we don’t know that.
That is very much conjecture,
and so take that
for what it’s worth,
which is very little.
But there are people who have wondered why the Bible would
tell us
where Abraham is, and then in the very next passage tell us that Sarah is somewhere else.
And you’ll notice here that says that Abraham rose,
he went to mourn for Sarah
in the land of Canaan.
And so this is just a very interesting detail in the story.
It’s not clear what we should make out of it,
but there are those who have thought that perhaps the Scripture’s
trying to tell us something.
So we’ve traced this theme numerous times now,
the importance of your
offspring in the Old Testament.
Of course, that is central here to God’s promise to Abraham.
A theme that maybe we’ve teased out less often,
but I would say is no less present in the Old
Testament is that of geography,
that idea of where God is taking you.
Certainly that becomes a prominent
theme in the book of Exodus with the idea of being taken to the promised land and the
wandering in the wilderness and all of the geographic sort of
context that that story has.
Here it is striking and notable that at the end of Sarah’s life,
they continue to live in a foreign land.
This idea that they continue to be on the road towards God,
carrying them forward.
So while God has kept this promise of the covenant bearer,
God continues to be leading and guiding.
So the story of Abram and also Sarai that began with them being called out of a foreign place and
forward is in many ways still a thing that’s happening so that even at the end of his wife’s
life.
Now we find in chapter 23 here Abraham now still has to negotiate for a place to bury his
wife because he’s not on land that is his.
And you know that’s a meaningful nod from the text
that God’s plan is still in motion that extends beyond the lifespan of just those first two people.
And we’re going to see that more explicitly as we move forward.
But that theme of geography,
how it anchors the story, that remains important.
And I think we see it here in this story.
Yeah, and we see it throughout the story because this burial site becomes the burial place for
Abraham and for some of the lineage after them.
This is seen in many ways if there was such a
thing as their family burial plot.
And Israel, the nation of Israel,
will look to this location
as the cemetery of sorts for this covenant family,
the kind of patriarchal family.
The rest of the story is interesting.
Abraham meets with the Hittites who are willing to give
him the land.
They say, “Just take it.” And he essentially says, “No,
I want to make sure that
I’m 100% above board.
Name a price.” And they come to an agreement and he pays.
And the idea, I think, here is the integrity of Abraham,
that he’s not willing to accept something
that he didn’t earn.
He doesn’t want this as a gift.
There’s that kind of a little bit of a stubbornness of saying,
“I am going to buy this.
I’m not going to take a gift for my wife’s burial place.
It is the right thing to do to purchase that,
and it should cost me,
and I’m going to pay it.”
We see some other stories like that scattered in the Old Testament,
but this seems to be what’s
going on here.
Yeah, there’s no theft.
There’s no trickery.
There’s no getting the better of this.
This is a straight up honorable transaction in which the land is purchased outright,
and therefore it rightly belongs to the one who bought it.
When we read the Bible devotionally,
it’s things like this that sometimes slip by us because fundamentally there’s not much of an
immediate takeaway here in terms of what you’re going to do today.
Other than,
fundamentally, God calls us to be people who are honest and people who live rightly in the land where we are,
whatever land that is,
or whether we be from there or not.
Abraham here seeks to do right,
even in the presence of the generosity of others.
He insists,
“No, let me pay the fair price for it.”
Here we end with him getting to bury his wife in a place where she and the family following her
will have a final place to be both remembered,
but then also, of course,
return to a sort of continuation of their stories in the place.
Right, and if you’ve had family members,
I suspect nearly all of us,
probably all of us,
have have been buried.
I mean, there is something tangible.
There’s something physical and
spiritual about a person’s grave site.
I was recently in Sioux City and went to a cemetery
to find my grandmother’s grave,
which I struggled to do because,
as it turned out,
they had removed a sidewalk a few years ago,
and I knew where it should be,
but I also knew it was near the sidewalk,
and so one of those things was still true.
But there’s something tangible about where a person’s body and remains are buried, and
that’s
only more true, perhaps, in this story because that represents the founder of the nation.
I mean,
Abraham and Sarah are the seed from which Israel grows,
and the idea of knowing
where their bodies are and revering that site is really important,
and we will see this site
come up again later in the story.
You know, Clint,
it’s interesting.
This language here that gets used in verse
four,
Abraham says to the Hittites,
“I’m a stranger and an alien residing among you.”
This, too, is a theme that we’ve seen brought up again.
It’s amazing how the Old Testament
writers do this in a way that is so natural.
This idea of being an alien,
being a person who’s not from that spot,
remember how we talked about hospitality being such a substantial part of
that culture, the idea of the rank sinfulness of Sodom,
that they would not only not be hospitable,
but they would go so far to the extent of being so depraved.
Here we see this idea that even the
Hittites are extending a form of hospitality to the alien,
even a recognition that other people,
though they not be the chosen people in the arc of this story,
they yet have the mark of those who
are willing to honor those who have gone on,
recognizing the basic humanity of those who are
seeking to honor their dead,
the reality that not everyone that surrounded Abraham was depraved or
wholly broken, as we’ve seen in other stories.
I think sometimes we see in the scriptures these
nods to the idea that,
you know, even though you might not be within the immediate umbrella of this story,
there are positives shown of many different people at many different terms,
and certainly this is a positive image of the Hittites.
They were explicitly willing to give up this land for no cost.
And so, you know, that looks very positive in terms of these other people,
though they be different,
though they have different traditions and ostensibly different gods,
that they’re still good to be found in it.
And, you know,
not every religious text includes that kind of nuance.
Clint, not
every text points to the positives like that,
so I think we can affirm that as being a
good look for others.
Right.
There’s actually a line in the story where Abraham says,
“I’ll pay you,” and the man who owns the cave says,
“My Lord,
listen, a piece of land worth 400 shekels of
silver, what is that between you and me?
Bear your dead.” And the offer is clear.
He’s giving him that cave.
That’s an act of generosity.
But having named that as its value,
Abraham then insists on
paying him that much.
But that Hittite man is extending that offer to him,
saying, “Look, our relationship is worth more than that.
You take this place and bury your dead.
You can have it.”
But Abraham insists on being the one who actually owns it and wants to pay for it,
which, again, is kind of a…
There’s a certain pridefulness in that,
and it shows up a couple different places
in the Scripture, stories like that.
So not unique, but this is the first time we’ve encountered it.
You know, Clint, as I reflect here towards the end of chapter 23,
it strikes me there’s a way in
which maybe we can say that this really does create the ending of a chapter.
I mean, though Abraham
continues to live in chapter 24,
the death of Sarah in some ways marks the reality that the torch
has been handed on,
that the offspring now lives.
God has miraculously saved Isaac in the binding story.
And so what we’re going to discover as we continue on in this study is that now we are
introducing Isaac, not the young boy,
but rather the one who God is going to keep the promise moving forward.
And so there’s a kind of transition now happening in this family, that there’s a
though Abraham continues to live,
this becomes a moment in which we can now see the the dawning
light of a new day coming.
And in many ways,
it will be a major handover from the original
one who was promised this blessing to the line that will now follow.
And it will dominate the
following part of this book as we see far less chapters devoted to any single character,
we’re going to see this progressively move even quicker.
And you know, in that that this is a moment maybe
to pause and look back and say,
you know, this is among the fullest accounts of any of these
patriarchal characters that we’re going to have.
And with Sarah’s death here,
we’re now coming to
see the end of one as we look ahead to those who will follow.
Yeah, this is the first loss that
we’ve had in this core lineage of the story.
And you know, that will be a theme as we go through
the generations, we’ll see more of that.
But this is the first time we’ve really seen one of the central characters.
And sometimes it’s tough because the Bible shifts great periods of time
without us really knowing it,
we just turn a page.
And we’re several decades down the road,
you know, remember that Abraham and Sarah are about 100 when Isaac is born,
and she now dies at 127.
So we’re talking about a young man somewhere in his mid 20s at this point, most likely.
And that much time has gone by without the Scripture really telling us what happened
during that time.
So we’re hitting the high points for sure.
But now,
to some extent, the bulk of the storyline will shift to Isaac and then on down through the other heirs.
I won’t spend too much time here,
Clint. I never thought of it quite in that way.
I think it’s a
really interesting comment.
The idea here, we’ve just seen 20 years extensively go by.
Isn’t it interesting how when we come to the Scriptures,
especially if we do that in a daily kind of
emotional way, we’re kind of looking for a word for the day,
in the sense in which the Scriptures
often don’t concern themselves with all of the days in between,
that they show us God’s interaction
at these pivotal moments,
and we’re left to sort of interpolate in that that there was faithfulness
in the period in between,
though it wasn’t always remarkable enough that it was included in these
texts.
There’s an interesting turn there I hadn’t thought of before.
Yeah, if Isaac was, in fact, a teenager when the sacrifice story happened, you know.
Oh, I’m sorry, Clint.
My bad.
Are we done?
It’s going to be done in about 10 seconds.
So finish quick.
We’ve been about 10 years,
at least, since we saw them last.
See you tomorrow.
All right.
Well, I made it really wonky, friends.
We’ll see you later.
See you tomorrow.