Hebron is located 30 kilometers south of Jerusalem, in a flourishing mountain valley surrounded by high mountains. The mountains serve as a natural border between the fertile lands in the west and the scorched yellow desert in the east.
The real biblical story begins with the life of the patriarch Abraham. Presumably around 2000 BC, he and his family roamed with their numerous herds of goats, sheep and donkeys near the houses of the oldest Mesopotamian city called Ur. But one day God commanded Abraham to go to the land of Canaan. There, in the city of Hebron, Abraham's wife Sarah died.
Bones of the Righteous
Among the four holy cities of Israel that have survived from ancient times, Hebron is the oldest. The historian Flavius Josephus believed that he was "older than Memphis in Egypt."
Hebron is mentioned numerous times in the Bible. Here Abraham was promised the long-awaited son Isaac, who later also lived in Hebron. And Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, came to Hebron.
When Sarah died, Abraham bought Machpela's cave from the Hittites, local residents, for 400 silver shekels and buried his wife in it. Subsequently, all three forefathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and their wives (except for Rachel) were buried there.
Makhpela became a shrine not only for Jews, but also for Muslims. Above the cave, the Arabs built a mosque, second only in holiness to the mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Jewish community existed in Hebron until the 19th century, but later collapsed due to Muslim repression. It was not until the Six Day War, when the Israel Defense Forces entered Hebron, that the Jewish community was re-established there.
Promotional video:
In the Jewish tradition, the name "Makhpela" means "double, pair". The cave is still practically unexplored. The earliest description was left by Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from the Navarra city of Tudela. During his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the middle of the 12th century, he visited the Makhpela underground.
“And there is a large room there,” the traveler said. “Jews gathered in it for prayer during the Muslim rule … And in the cave six lamps are burning, day and night, near the graves. And there are also many barrels with the bones of the dead of the people of Israel, who buried their dead there. Each person brought the bones of their ancestors there, which lie there to this day.
Today the entrance to the Makhpela cave is walled up, but the mosque above it is active. But here's what's interesting: the mosque and two minarets are surrounded by a Cyclopean wall 12 meters high! This monumental structure - rectangular in plan - is made of carefully processed limestone blocks up to 7.5 meters long and up to one and a half meters thick! According to the researchers, the original structure was without a roof, there were only walls. Only in the Byzantine era a church appeared here, which later became a mosque. But when were the walls erected over Machpela? Either in the time of Abraham, or after, under Solomon or even King Herod.
Brave Michal
In the mosque, in the prayer hall, near the wall there is a small dome on four columns, erected over the entrance to the cave in 1423. There are many legends according to which those who descended into the cave were speechless and died. Therefore, it is strictly forbidden to enter there. Nevertheless, after the Six Day War, in 1968, Moshe Dayan, then Israel's Minister of Defense, as well as a lover of history and archeology, found himself in a mosque and decided to go underground. However, the discovered hole, which led directly downward, had a diameter of only 28 centimeters. Then the 12-year-old thin girl Michal, the daughter of one of the Israeli officers, descended into the cave. What the girl saw did not resemble an ordinary natural cavity. Michal herself made pencil sketches and photographs. It turned out that there are tombstones, niches, steps underground,and in some places you can make out the inscriptions. At the request of Moshe Dayan, the girl wrote down how it was: “On Wednesday, October 9, 1968, my mother asked me if I would agree to go down a narrow hole into the cave. I agreed … They tied me up with ropes, gave me a lantern and matches … and began to lower me. I landed on a pile of papers and paper money. I found myself in a square room. Against me were three tombstones, the middle taller and more decorated than the other two. There was a small square opening in the wall opposite. I asked to let go of the rope a little, crawled through it and found myself in a low, narrow corridor carved into the rock. The corridor looked like a rectangular box. At the end of it there was a staircase that rested against the wall. Mom asked me if I would agree to go down the narrow opening into the cave. I agreed … They tied me up with ropes, gave me a lantern and matches … and began to lower me. I landed on a pile of papers and paper money. I found myself in a square room. Against me were three tombstones, the middle taller and more decorated than the other two. There was a small square opening in the wall opposite. I asked to let go of the rope a little, crawled through it and found myself in a low, narrow corridor carved into the rock. The corridor looked like a rectangular box. At the end of it there was a staircase that rested against the wall. Mom asked me if I would agree to go down the narrow opening into the cave. I agreed … They tied me up with ropes, gave me a lantern and matches … and began to lower me. I landed on a pile of papers and paper money. I found myself in a square room. Against me were three tombstones, the middle taller and more decorated than the other two. There was a small square opening in the wall opposite. I asked to let go of the rope a little, climbed through it and found myself in a low, narrow corridor carved into the rock. The corridor looked like a rectangular box. At the end of it there was a staircase that rested against the wall. Against me were three tombstones, the middle taller and more decorated than the other two. There was a small square opening in the wall opposite. I asked to let go of the rope a little, climbed through it and found myself in a low, narrow corridor carved into the rock. The corridor looked like a rectangular box. At the end of it there was a staircase that rested against the wall. Against me were three tombstones, the middle taller and more decorated than the other two. There was a small square opening in the wall opposite. I asked to let go of the rope a little, crawled through it and found myself in a low, narrow corridor carved into the rock. The corridor looked like a rectangular box. At the end of it there was a staircase that rested against the wall.
I measured the narrow corridor with steps - it was equal to 34 steps. On the descent I counted 16 steps, and on the ascent only 15. I climbed and descended five times, but the result remained the same.
Each step was 25 centimeters high … The width of the corridor was one step, and its height was about one meter. When they pulled me upstairs, I dropped the lantern. I had to go down and go up again. Michal.
The papers and paper money on which Michal landed, according to experts, belonged to a dervish who once sat in front of the entrance to the cave and predicted the future from paper: he threw a piece of paper into the cave, and if the piece of paper fell immediately, it was a good sign, if not immediately - bad.
Egyptian trace?
Another attempt to enter the cave was made in the fall of 1981, on the eve of the Jewish New Year. While prayers were being read all night in the halls of the mosque, a group of young people, with the help of crowbars and crowbars, lifted a small marble slab and went down the stairs to the corridor that Michal had previously examined. Young people walked along the corridor and entered the room where the tombstones stood. Lifting them up, they made sure that the tombs … there is nothing! But they felt that a breeze was pulling from under the stone floor. Opening it with a crowbar, they opened a new hole going down. This was the entrance to the original Machpela cave, which really turned out to be double.
One of the participants of that night expedition, Noam Arnon, later said: “I will never forget how we began to crawl down this manhole lower and lower and finally ended up in a cave, which was really from two halls … It was impossible to go there - the cave was covered with earth. I crawled on and suddenly found that I was crawling on human bones … We decided that we had enough and began to return back … This adventure did not bring any discoveries, but confirmed the fact that once upon a time, access to the cave was opened and that the Jews buried the remains of their dead in this sacred land for them.
It is believed that the structure above Mahpela Cave resembles some types of Egyptian mastab tombs. The imposing rectangular stone boxes may have been erected long before the burials appeared in them. Note that in the photo taken by young Michal of the stairs located at the end of the corridor, you can see not only the steps, but also the masonry of the corridor walls, assembled from large stone blocks ground to each other. This in itself is a characteristic element of very ancient buildings. And one more thing: the plan of the corridor is very close to the plan of the so-called passages of the great Egyptian pyramids. These rectangular passages - narrow and low, completely inconvenient for the movement of people - usually lead to false dead ends, behind which something is hidden.
Modern researchers are unable to accurately date the time of the construction of the megalithic walls around Machpela. Some believe that Abraham acquired not just a rock with a cave as a place for the grave of his wife, but precisely walls, powerful, capable of protecting the sacred dust from tomb robbers like a fortress. It is possible that the walls were already protecting something sacred, hidden from human eyes.
Riddles remain. The Old Testament is laconic, so it is impossible to understand when the walls around the cave appeared, when the underground room, stairs and corridor were created. It is also unclear where the true dust of the forefathers is, and, probably, this secret will not be revealed soon.
Mikhail EFIMOV