place
Machpelah
מַכְפֵּלָה
Machpelah, a cave near Hebron purchased by Abraham as a burial place for Sarah and later used for other patriarchs (Genesis 23:9, 17-19).
- verses
- 6
- first named
- Genesis 23:9
- last named
- Genesis 50:13
- feature
- settlement
- coordinates
- 31.52°N · 35.11°E
Cave of the Patriarchs (OpenBible)
The gazetteer records one identification, and no competing one.
Description
Machpelah in the text
Machpelah was a cave located near Hebron in Canaan, which Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite as a burial place for his wife Sarah (Genesis 23:9, 17-19). The field and the cave were deeded to Abraham as a possession for a burying place (Genesis 23:20). Abraham himself was later buried in the cave of Machpelah by his sons Isaac and Ishmael (Genesis 25:9-10). The cave also became the burial place for Isaac, Rebekah, and Leah (Genesis 49:30-31), as well as Israel (or 'Jacob') (Genesis 50:13). The cave of Machpelah served as a significant burial site for the patriarchs and their wives, and it represented the Israelites' connection to the land of Canaan.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Is a
Located in
Stands in the same events as
The pattern
Where Machpelah is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
6 verses across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in Genesis (6).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 6, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Not the direct relations above — these are one hop further out, ranked so that a rare shared connection outweighs a common one.
Where they appear
What happened here
Atlas's reading of each chapter this place appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources