"Hear us, my lord. You are a prince of God amongst us. In the choicest of our graves, bury your dead. Not one of us will keep you from burying your dead!"... He spoke to them, saying, "If you are willing to bury my dead from before me, listen to me, and beseech Ephron, the son of Tzochar for me.
The Ohr Hachaim explains the underlying negotiations that were taking place between the people of Ches and Avraham Avinu in these pessukim.
The people of Ches started their message to Avraham with the word שְׁמָעֵנוּ – listen to us. They were telling him to understand the depths of their point.
The Gemara tells us a Halacha about property ownership. If a person lives in a property for three years, with no claims having been made against him, the Beis Din will accept his claim that the property is his as though he produced a document of ownership. However, this is only if the owners had the ability to protest and did not use it. That would tell us that the property was sold. If, however, the person living in the property is a powerful person, from the family of the Reish Galusa – the leader of the exiles, this Halacha is irrelevant. Even when Klal Yisroel was in exile, they were self-governed by a rich and powerful leader in Babylon, and that leader and his family were too powerful for anyone to lodge a complaint against him. If he loses his power and someone calls him to Beis Din for illegally squatting on his property, he cannot use the claim that he had lived there for three years undisturbed.
The people of Ches were telling Avraham that he was a prince among them. His being a prince placed him in a detrimental position, because he could not simply use the land as an owner. If he were ever to lose his power, the people of Ches could dig up the body and reclaim the land. They could say that they left the body there undisturbed for so many years out of fear of the tremendous power of Avraham. He would be suspected of abusing his power and grabbing the land without payment or agreement from the original owners. This would show that they were not particularly interested in his purchasing the property, and all he could do was force them, leading to their reserving a counter-claim if he lost his power.
Alternatively, they meant to tell him the opposite point. He was a G-dly prince among them; nobody would ever dare suggest that he would misuse his power and position to claim something that wasn’t his. They were fully willing to sell him the property, and he could trust them that they would leave it in his possession.
They told him to hear their claim and properly ensure his rights understanding their meaning and appreciating how to foresee the future claims.
He answered them – if you truly wish to sell me a piece of land to bury my departed relative, please speak to Ephron. If they were willing to act as agents in this sale, they were showing full willingness to participate in the sale, and that they could be trusted not to use the mendacious claim that Avraham would abuse his powers as a prince.
