In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 23, Abraham purchases a field with a cave in it. It was to be a place to bury his deceased wife, Sarah. The Hittites who owned the field offered it to him, with no charge, but Abraham insisted on paying a fair price for it. The cave is known as the Cave of Machpelah.
The site ended up being the burial site of three husband and wife pairs of the patriarchs. They are Abraham and his wife Sarah, their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and their son Jacob and his wife Leah.
Jacob, as we know, became the father of sons who would each found one of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Book of Genesis, Chapter 49, gives Jacob's instructions for his burial. The final chapter of the Book of Genesis, Chapter 50, describes the great funeral procession from Egypt, including the pharaoh's top officials, to bury Jacob at this traditional burial site that had been purchased by his grandfather, Abraham.
Islamic theology splits from that of Jews and Christians after Abraham, with Moslems believing that the family line went through Abraham's older son, Ishmael, rather than through Isaac. Jews and Christians claim that this is because Ishmael was the son of a slave woman, while Isaac was the son of his true wife Sarah.
The burial site is about 30 km south of the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, which we saw in the posting "Esau And The Temple Mount". Like the Temple Mount King Herod, who reigned at the time Jesus was born, built a massive wall around this field where the patriarchs are buried.
In fact, as seen today, it very much resembles the Temple Mount, and is supposedly the most sacred Jewish site after the Temple Mount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount#/media/File:South_Temple_Mount.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs#/media/File:Hebron_Cave_of_the_Patriarchs.jpg
After biblical times, a Byzantine church stood on the site and the bodies of the patriarchs are believed to have been discovered during the Crusades, when the site was controlled by Christians for a time. Saladin built a mosque over the site, and the two remaining minarets are from that time.
In the Fourteenth Century the Mamluks, based in Egypt, build six cenotaphs on the site, one for each of the patriarchs buried there.
But the question arises as to why Rachel and Joseph are not also buried here.
Rachel was Jacob's second, and favorite, wife, and Joseph was the oldest son of Jacob and Rachel. Joseph was the son who the Book of Genesis describes as having had prophetic dreams of leadership over his older brothers, which aroused their resentment. One day, while out tending sheep, they saw him coming and plotted to kill him and say that a wild animal had killed him. But the oldest brother decided against killing him, and they sold him to some passing merchants as a slave instead.
But it turned out that there was in a plan in the whole episode, and God was with Joseph as he was sold as a slave in Egypt. After being falsely accused of trying to seduce his master's wife, he was put in jail. But God was with him there and he first foretold the dreams of two other prisoners, former pharaoh's chief baker and chief butler, and then of pharaoh himself.
Joseph ended up being appointed as governor of Egypt and, when his brothers later came to the country to buy food due to a famine, Joseph's dreams of leadership over his brothers indeed came true, although they did not at first recognize him.
Joseph, like his father Jacob before him, gave instructions for his bones to eventually be buried in their homeland. More than four centuries later, as Moses led the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, he brought Joseph's bones along. But Joseph, like his mother Rachel, were not buried at the site with the other patriarchs.
Rachel is buried in the northern part of Bethlehem where Jesus, although descended not from her but from her sister Leah, would one day be born. The present tomb structure is from the Ottoman era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel%27s_Tomb#/media/File:Raakelinhauta.png
Joseph is buried further north, at Shechem. His tomb structure was built during the Nineteenth Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%27s_Tomb#/media/File:KeverYosef5600.JPG
Even though Moslem theology goes through Abraham's son, Ishmael, and not through Isaac and Jacob, Jacob's son Joseph is still revered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%27s_Tomb#/media/File:Grave_of_Joseph.jpg
In the posting, "Esau And The Temple Mount", I described my spiritual theory of the Temple Mount. Jacob, with the help of his mother Rebecca, deceived the nearly-blind Isaac into giving his blessing to the younger son Jacob, instead of his brother Esau. While the deception was allowed by God, it was still a deception and ultimately had to be made right.
King Herod, who was a descendant of Esau, dismantled the Jews' Temple, the one that had been built to replace the original one after return from exile in Babylon, in order to build a grand new temple. He enlarged the Temple Mount by building a massive retaining wall around it, and then filling in the gap. Since this additional structure was built by a descendant of Esau to add to the Temple of the Jews, who were the descendants of his deceptive brother Jacob, I see it as representing the righting of the deception which gave Jacob Esau's birthright, and bringing Esau back to his rightful place.
My belief is that Jacob, possessed of the birthright as Isaac's son by the deception of his older brother Esau, had to pay for it by himself being deceived when he sought a wife. He left and went to work for his mother's brother, Laban, who had a beautiful daughter named Rachel. Jacob agreed to work for seven years for Laban as a bride price for Rachel.
But, at the end of the seven-year period, the tables were turned and it was Jacob's turn to be on the receiving end of a deception. The veiled bride that he was given turned out to be not Rachel but her not-quite-as-attractive older sister, Leah. It was explained to Jacob that it was not done that the younger sister should be married before the older. However, Jacob was allowed to have Rachel as a wife also, in return for another seven years of labor.
This price that Jacob had to pay, for the deception of his older brother, is that his primary wife would be the older sister, instead of the younger one that he chose.
In spiritual justice, this is why Jacob is buried with Leah in the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel, although still very important, is buried elsewhere. In the same way that Herod, the descendant of Esau, brought him back into the birthright by construction of the Temple Mount that enlarged the sacred Mount Moriah upon which the first two temples had been built.
Herod also built the wall around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and the two structures look similar from the outside. One wall represents Jacob buried with the older sister, as the other represents him reunited with his older brother. Jacob and Esau actually did later reconcile, to bury their father Isaac here at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
Leah gave birth to more sons of Jacob, who were the founders of the Twelve Tribes, than Rachel did. Judah, who by birthright became the predominant tribe, so that all Israelites became known as Jews, was a son of Leah, not of Rachel or of either of their maids. Judah was actually the fourth-born, but Reuben forfeited his right to leadership by getting together with one of the maids, Bilhah, who had given birth to some of his brothers. Simeon and Levi were the next two sons, but they forfeited their leadership rights by slaughtering the town of Shechem because their sister, Jacob's only daughter Dinah, had been raped there. This left Judah, the next-in-line fourth-born, from whose tribe Jesus was born.
Rachel, who Jacob originally wanted as a wife, was reduced to being secondary to her older sister, in spiritual justice for Jacob's deception of his older brother. Rachel's two sons with Jacob were Joseph and Benjamin. She actually died while giving birth to Benjamin. When the country would later split, during the time of King Rehoboam, into Israel and Judah, Benjamin would be absorbed into the greater tribe of Judah.
Joseph had two sons in Egypt, with the wife that pharaoh gave him who was pharaoh's sister-in-law, and these became patriarchs too, forming their namesake tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Ephraim was the leading tribe of Israel, after it had split from Judah. But these, along with the rest of Israel, are the "Ten Lost Tribes", who were taken into exile by Assyria, and scattered around the Assyrian Empire, never to return. Some time later, Judah was also taken into exile, by Babylon, but returned to restore the country.
Jacob's deception of his older brother, to become the founder of the twelve tribes of Israel through his twelve sons, was to be reflected in his two grandsons through Joseph, which founded two of the tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh.
The reason that Joseph, one of the twelve sons, had two tribes, through these two sons, is that the tribe of Levi, the third-born son, was not to hold territory in Israel, but was to be the priesthood tribe. Religious leaders from Moses to John the Baptist would be from the tribe of Levi, but Jesus would not. Jesus was from the leading tribe, that of Judah, and John the Baptist's being the herald of Jesus represents a moving on from the old priesthood to the real Savior, who can actually save people from sin.
Before his death, Jacob blessed Ephraim before Manasseh. Joseph, their father, tried to correct Jacob, as Manasseh was the older of the sons. But Jacob insisted that Ephraim would predominate, and his tribe indeed became the leading tribe of Israel, the northern kingdom, after the split from Judah during the time of King Rehoboam. Joseph's being wrong in that his oldest son should be the predominant one is spiritual justice, in the same way as the order of the two wives of his father Jacob, for Joseph's earlier prophetic dreams of predominance over his older brothers, which came true.
Upon marrying Leah and Rachel, it was Leah who initially did all of the childbearing, so that the oldest sons were hers, even though it was clear that the attractive Rachel was Jacob's favorite wife. It had to be this way so that it would be Leah's descendants who would lead, rather than Rachel's, because she, the older sister, had to be the primary wife in payment for Jacob's getting the blessing to found Israel by deceiving his older brother. That is why Jacob had to be buried with Leah, in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and Rachel and her son Joseph had to be buried elsewhere.
The following scenes begin on the roof of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in the West Bank city of Hebron.
There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow, ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.
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