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Religiosity God, Real Estate, And Israel Open your Bibles, if you would, to Genesis, chapter 23. Read the words there, and travel back in time nearly 4,000 years, to the age of the patriarchs. This chapter concerns Abraham, who is not just any patriarch: he is a patriarch of all three monotheisms, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic alike. By this time in Abraham’s life, God has long ago made his promise to him as the father of the multitudinous nation of Israel, entrancing him with deep dark dread, and saying, "To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates." [Genesis 15:18] Sodom and Gomorrah have been destroyed [Genesis 19], and God has stayed Abraham’s hand in the land of Moriah [Genesis 22], preventing him from offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice and thus prohibiting the Israelites from the then-common practice of sacrificing humans to their God. Now, Abraham’s wife Sarah has died at the age of 127, and he himself is an old man nearing the end of his days. Although God has given him a spiritual grant to the land of Canaan, Abraham and his family are still sojourners in foreign territory: they have no practical, real-world claim to it. In Genesis 23, we read of Abraham’s negotiations with the council of the "children of Heth" to acquire the cave of Machpelah, so that he can bury Sarah on land to which he and his descendents hold clear, legal title. It is, in short, a depiction of the moment at which the spiritual covenant of God with Israel becomes manifest in the real world of human cultural, social, and political interaction. It is the first instance of the Jewish people laying claim to land as Israelites. Thus, it is at the spiritual and religious heart of current Jewish claims to land in Israel, and bears examination. Jewish Biblical law recognizes two distinct types of land: sdeh ahuzah (a "field of possession"), and sdeh mikneh (a “field which has been purchased”). Sdeh ahuzah is that which a person possessed for many generations. Such a field may be sold for a specified period of time, during which it is called a “purchased field,” sdeh mikneh. As a "resident alien," Abraham approaches his hosts, seeking a place to bury his wife. Evidently, Abraham is held in high regard, for he is offered a place in any of their choicest sepulchers, effectively giving him the status of a family member. But this is not enough for Abraham: his wife will be buried in a borrowed tomb, and he himself will have no claim to the space, nor will his descendents. So he demurs, pleading with them to approach Ephrom son of Zohar, so that Ephrom will sell Abraham the cave of Machpelah at full price (this would include not just the cave itself, but the surrounding district, cf. verse 17). At first, Ephrom publicly offers the land to Abraham as a gift—essentially, sdeh mikneh, which will not necessarily pass on to Abraham’s descendents. But this is not what Abraham needs: he insists on a full and formal sale. Ephrom eventually agrees, asking what is--by all accounts--an exorbitant price for the time, 400 shekels of silver. Abraham pays it, and thus acquires full, inheritable title to the cave and the Machpelah district: sdeh ahuzah. Now: according to Jewish law, a field possessed by one person (sdeh ahuzah) can never become another person's hereditary possession; likewise, a purchased field (sdeh mikneh) can never become a possessed field owned in perpetuity. Leviticus 25: 13-34 and 27:16-24 state that any owner of property who has been compelled to part with his land because of poverty or some other reason has the right to receive his property back free in the Jubilee year. In Jewish law, the Jubilee year is the year that follows immediately seven successive Sabbatic years (the Sabbatic year is the seventh year of a seven-year cycle). Thus, the Jubilee year takes place at the end of seven times seven years, i.e. at the end of every forty-nine years, or the fiftieth year. This means, essentially, that the transfer of property among ancient Hebrews was not truly the sale of the land itself but of the land’s produce for a certain number of years. The price was fixed according to the number of years which intervened between the year of the sale and that of the next year of Jubilee. However, Abraham’s hosts, the "children of Heth," are not Hebrews, and seem to be unaware of this law. In any event, Abraham did in fact succeed in establishing a perpetual claim on the land. This distinction is reflected in the original Hebrew: throughout the transaction, Abraham requests possession of the parcel, and the final verse of the chapter reflects the permanent nature of that transfer. Had Abraham acquired the district of Machpelah from another Hebrew, the seller would have had the right to reclaim the land at some future point. Which brings us to the current state of affairs in modern Israel. The district of Machpelah containing the cave in which Sarah and, eventually, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob were buried is known today as Hebron. The cave is the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and is surpassed as a Jewish holy site only by the Temple Mount itself. Until the Arab riots of 1929, a small community of Jews coexisted there with their Muslim neighbors. Those Muslim neighbors protected the Jews from the mobs that killed 67 of their fellows, and the survivors were transferred from Hebron by the British. Hebron was recaptured by Israel in 1967, and today the Tomb of the Patriarchs is divided in half by a heavy gate: one side for Jews, the other for Muslims. Hebron itself is still mostly Muslim. It is also the troubled site of one of the oldest and largest of the problematic Jewish settlements on the West Bank, with a population of about 6,000 settlers. However, that’s not the most interesting part of this story. Between 1878 and 1908 Jews purchased around 400,000 dunams (a dunam is about an acre) from Muslim landowners. The total area of Palestine was about 27 million dunams. Many prominent Arab families sold lands to the Jewish immigrants, driven mainly by rising prices fueled by Zionist demand. Between 1910 and 1944, land prices in Palestine increased by as much as 5,000 percent [Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 38]. Sound familiar? It should. Parcels of land, sold by non-Jews to Jews for exorbitant prices. It was the deal between Ephrom and Abraham all over again. But these land deals were not as trouble-free as that ancient exchange: if Ephrom or his heirs ever had any objections, they were never recorded, and had no effect upon the subsequent development of Israel as a nation. Islam, however, regards all land conquered by Muslims as a perpetual part of the inalienable, divinely sanctioned Dar al Islam. While the prominent Arab families were quite willing to line their coffers with Jewish gold in exchange for what was to them useless land in the backwaters of the Ottoman empire, other Muslims were a bit more sanguine about the idea of a Jewish nation being founded, dunam by dunam, upon Islamic soil. Here, the essential conflict in the region can be plainly seen. Since the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 66 and the subsequent dispersal of the Jewish people, their lands, considered by them to be sdeh ahuzah in perpetuity, have been temporarily held by Muslims and others as sdeh mikneh. To the Zionists, even though they were largely secular in orientation, the payment of exorbitant prices for each dunam in the late 19th and early 20th century was merely the reclamation of hereditary lands which their people had been compelled to surrender under threat of force. Machpelah, along with the Temple Mount and the grave of Joseph in Shechem, forms the core of the Jewish cultural and spiritual claim on the land of Israel. In their consciousness as a people, the claim dates back nearly 4,000 years to that numinous moment when the ephemeral promise of God was transubstantiated into the legally contracted sale of a parcel of real estate. Until an event of equivalent cultural magnitude occurs, there will be no peace in that land.
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