The Torah describes with the sad story of the sunset of the first Jewish matriarch, Sarah, and her husband Abraham’s efforts to purchase a family burial-plot for Sarah and himself, as well as for future couples of the founding Jewish family (Genesis 23). Abraham negotiates a deal with a man named Efron and ends up paying an enormous amount of money (400 large and pure silver) for a field in Hebron, at whose edge was the “machpalah cave,” or the “double cave,” a cave suited for the burial of couples’ side-by-side of each other.
Indeed, as the Bible relates, all of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel (besides Rachel) – Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Leah and Jacob – were buried in that cave. The edifice constructed upon it remains till today one of the holiest sites in Judaism and is also held in high esteem by Muslims. Immediately following this story, the Bible continues to relate the long dramatic story of how Isaac meets and marries his soul-mate Rebecca. This is the section in Torah known as “the portion of relationships,” and is read in many Jewish Sephardic communities on the Sabbath before a wedding in the community.
Awful Comparisons
Sequence in the Bible is critical. It is always there to demonstrate a point, to challenge a convention, to inspire an ideal. How, then, are we to appreciate the juxtaposition between such paradoxical themes – the death and burial of Sarah in the “machpalah cave,” and the dawn of Isaac and Rebecca's life as a married couple?
There is something even more astonishing in the Talmud. Biblical law is often ambiguous and riddle-like. Thus, when Moses presented the Torah to the Jewish people, he gave them an oral interpretation, clarifying and elucidating the meaning of the Bible. This oral tradition has been documented in the Mishnah and in the Talmud.
Marriage is one of those issues where the Biblical law is unclear and it requires interpretation. The Torah speaks of “a man marrying a woman,” but does not specify the legal means to affect a marriage. The Talmud presents an oral tradition to fill the gap. A similar expression used when discussing marriage is found once more in the Bible when addressing Abraham’s purchase of the machpalah cave. In a classical method of Torah interpretation known as “gzeirah shavah” (comparing two distinct cases when a similar word is used in both), we legally compare the two cases. Just as Abraham purchased the field and the cave by means of money, so too must a groom give a monetary gift to his bride if he wishes to obtain her hand in marriage.
Till today this law is the basis of every Jewish marriage. When the groom places the ring on the finger of his bride and declares “you are hereby betrothed to me...” man and woman enter into the covenant of marriage. Why? Because we derive it from the legal formula employed by Abraham to purchase the machpalah cave.
This is classical Talmudic methodology well-known to any student of the Talmud. Yet it does seem tasteless, if not awful. Why are we deriving the laws of marriage from a story of death and burial? The death of Sarah terminated her marriage with Abraham; yet it is from a story which terminated a marriage that we deduce the laws of creating a marriage! And why are we comparing the obtaining of a spouse to the purchase of a burial plot? (The cynic would recall Woody Allen's quip: “Marriage is the death of hope.”) The comparison is so strange and bizarre that it compels us to look deeper, to gaze into the secret “caves” of our own relationships.
