Place · Land of Israel / Judea
Hebron
Ancient names: Hebron, Kiryat Arba
A city in Judah's hill country associated with patriarchal traditions and the Cave of Machpelah.
31.5246°N 35.1047°E · representative coordinate · Pleiades 687915 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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In Hebron, in the West Bank, religious Jews venerate the Cave of Machpelah as Abraham's tomb. The identification developed among Jews and Christians in antiquity and rests on no evidence that Abraham and his descendants are buried there; the site is entangled in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Names resembling Abram and Jacob appear in Mesopotamian sources from the early or middle second millennium BCE, and customs described in Genesis (adopting a servant as heir, arranged marriages, deathbed blessings) seemed at first to match texts from sites such as Nuzi. These parallels were read as memory of an origin among nomads tied to Mesopotamia.