What and Where Is Abraham's Tomb?

Abraham's Tomb sits in the heart of the Old City of Hebron, in the Judean hills about 30 kilometers south of Jerusalem. Jews have always known it by its biblical name, the Cave of Machpelah, and it is revered as the second holiest place in Judaism after the Temple Mount. The tomb of Abraham is also called the Tomb of the Patriarchs, since Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried there together with the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. For a fuller account of the site's layers and structure, see this overview of the cave and its history.

The Bible's Record: Abraham Buys the Caveבְּרֵאשִׁית כ״ג

Genesis 23, read each year in the Torah portion of Chayei Sarah.

The story of Abraham's Tomb begins with a purchase, not a promise. When Sarah died at Hebron, Abraham approached Ephron the Hittite and the elders of the city and insisted on paying the full market price for the cave and the field around it. The Torah records the sum, the weighing of the silver, the witnesses at the city gate, and the exact boundaries of the property. This is the first recorded acquisition of land by Abraham or his descendants in Canaan, set out with the care of a legal deed. The official historical background from Israel's Foreign Ministry notes that the city's story has been inseparable from this cave ever since.

• Genesis 23:16

  וַיִּשְׁמַע אַבְרָהָם אֶל־עֶפְרוֹן וַיִּשְׁקֹל אַבְרָהָם לְעֶפְרֹן אֶת־הַכֶּסֶף אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר בְּאָזְנֵי בְנֵי־חֵת אַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שֶׁקֶל כֶּסֶף עֹבֵר לַסֹּחֵר׃

  And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the hearing of the children of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.

  Genesis 23:16, JPS 1917

  Summary. The price is public, weighed out before witnesses, and paid in full. Abraham refuses the offer of the land as a gift so that no one could later dispute his title. It is a transaction recorded like a contract, which is precisely why later tradition treated it as unassailable.

• Genesis 23:19

  וְאַחֲרֵי־כֵן קָבַר אַבְרָהָם אֶת־שָׂרָה אִשְׁתּוֹ אֶל־מְעָרַת שְׂדֵה הַמַּכְפֵּלָה עַל־פְּנֵי מַמְרֵא הִוא חֶבְרוֹן בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן׃

  And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre, the same is Hebron, in the land of Canaan.

  Genesis 23:19, JPS 1917

  Summary. The verse fixes the tomb to a named place: Machpelah, before Mamre, which the text identifies as Hebron. Sarah is the first of the matriarchs and patriarchs laid to rest here, and the burial turns a purchased field into an eternal family holding.

Who Is Buried in the Tomb of Abraham?

Three couples rest in the Cave of Machpelah: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Jewish tradition adds Adam and Eve, which is one reason the name Machpelah, meaning doubled, is often read as a reference to the four couples. The one notable absence is the matriarch Rachel, who died in childbirth and was buried near Bethlehem rather than in Hebron. Jacob's final charge to his sons, recorded at the very end of his life, names the tomb and everyone in it.

• Genesis 49:31

  שָׁמָּה קָבְרוּ אֶת־אַבְרָהָם וְאֵת שָׂרָה אִשְׁתּוֹ שָׁמָּה קָבְרוּ אֶת־יִצְחָק וְאֵת רִבְקָה אִשְׁתּוֹ וְשָׁמָּה קָבַרְתִּי אֶת־לֵאָה׃

  There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah.

  Genesis 49:31, JPS 1917

  Summary. Jacob, dying in Egypt, asks to be carried back to the cave his grandfather bought. The verse is a roll call of the tomb's occupants and a statement that the family's ties to Hebron were meant to outlast exile.

Herod's Enclosure: The Building Above the Tomb

The massive stone structure standing over Abraham's Tomb today was raised by Herod the Great, king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 BCE. He built the same kind of enclosure over the cave that he built around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, using enormous dressed ashlar blocks laid without mortar. A classical reference survey of the site records that the walls still stand at close to their original height, enclosing a rectangle of roughly 47 by 27 meters; you can read the technical description in this academic entry on Hebron. It is the only Herodian building anywhere that survives fully intact, and its masonry is the twin of the surviving courses of the Western Wall. For the wider record of Jewish monumental building in that same period, see the ministry's account of Second Temple period tombs and architecture.

Abraham's Tomb Under Christian and Muslim Rule

Because Abraham is honored by Christians and Muslims as well, the building above his tomb passed through many hands. Byzantine Christians enclosed the Herodian walls inside a large basilica. After the Muslim conquest of 638 the church became a mosque, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque or Sanctuary of Abraham. Crusaders turned it back into a church in 1100; Saladin restored it as a mosque in 1187. Under the Mamluks the site was closed to Jews and Christians altogether, and for roughly 700 years, from 1267 until 1967, Jews were permitted no closer than the seventh step of an outer staircase. One scholarly account of these many turns is available in this history of the site. Through all of it, Jews kept coming to Hebron to pray at the step, and never relinquished their claim.

How Abraham's Tomb Proves Jewish Ownership of Hebron

The purchase in Genesis 23 is more than a burial story; it is the deed to the first Jewish property in the Land of Israel. Ancient Jewish tradition (Genesis Rabbah 79:7) singles out Machpelah, along with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and Joseph's tomb in Shechem, as one of a handful of holdings whose Jewish ownership cannot honestly be contested, precisely because the Bible records the sale in full. The claim is not only textual. When the caves beneath the structure were entered in 1981, Iron Age pottery from the Hebron and Jerusalem hills was recovered, evidence of Israelite presence and veneration around the eighth century BCE; a firsthand account of reaching the caverns appears in this description of what explorers found inside. Excavations at the nearby tell add further depth, as set out in this study of the city's Bronze and Iron Age remains.

Abraham's Tomb Today

Everything changed in June 1967. When Hebron came under Israeli control during the Six-Day War, the seventh-step restriction that had humbled Jews for centuries was lifted, and Jewish worshippers returned to the tomb of the patriarchs for the first time in 700 years. The site is now open to visitors of all faiths, though under arrangements that followed the 1990s accords the building is divided, and the Muslim religious authority administers a large part of it. On the Shabbat of Chayei Sarah, when the Torah reading recounts Abraham's purchase, tens of thousands of Jews come to Hebron to mark the moment their claim to the land was written down.

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