Sarah's Death and Resurrection

There is a basic problem with the life and death of Sarah in Genesis 23-24.

In Genesis 23 Sarah dies and we mourn her passing with Abraham. Abraham buys a burial plot adjacent to the site that will later become one of Judah’s most important cities (Hebron).

Alas, Abraham is getting old as well, and starts speaking about his own death. He sends his servant to Syria to find a wife for his son Isaac, and he comes back with Rebecca.

By this time, we have reconciled ourselves with Sarah’s death, but right at the end of Chapter 24 she is miraculously resurrected. Rebecca can meet her mother in law! (We assume that she is not meeting her mother in law’s urn).

Isaac then brought her into the tent to his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife

We begin to hope that Sarah may live to see her grandchildren. But then in the same verse Sarah is killed off.

Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.

What is going on here?

What is going on is two different authors. According to the first author she never actually dies, and for all we know she does meet her grandchildren. The later author had to kill her twice. Once with a lot of fanfare in Genesis 23, the next time quickly, to make sure she remained dead.

Why couldn’t the author of Genesis 23 who kills off Sarah prematurely have placed the whole episode of Sarah’s burial after she met Rebecca, and thus saved us from this inconsistency. Why was it important to kill her off early?

The rabbis hypothesize that Sarah died from grief upon hearing that Abraham took Isaac into the desert to sacrifice him. They rely on the adjacency of texts. The sacrifice of Isaac appears immediately before the death of Sarah in the canonical text of Genesis.

On the face of it that doesn’t make very much sense. Isaac escapes unscathed, and there is no record of Abraham telling Sarah anything of what he did. But it at least addresses the problem.

It is not plausible, however.

The author who wrote of Sarah’s death and the subsequent purchase of her burial plot would never suggest such intense pathos on the part of a biblical character. This is a bloodless bureaucrat that loves numbers and lists, not the tears of a woman.

Something else is going on here.

To understand the function of this episode we have to get to know our bloodless bureaucrat a little more. He is actually a complicated guy. Of all the authors of the Five Books of Moses he is most invested in ethics. Other authors, especially the Yahwist revels in depicting Israel’s ancestors as ethically compromised for many reasons, but it is important to this priestly character that his ancestors behaved ethically.

One of the thorniest ethical issues in the first books of the Hebrew Bible is the conquest of Canaan. When the Israelites came to Canaan it was inhabited and then according to the book of Joshua they killed everyone and moved in. That is the diametric opposite of ethical behavior. The only author that seems concerned in any way about this massacre is this Priestly author. Earlier authors seems somewhat less concerned mainly because they didn’t posit as much killing. It was the later Priestly and Deuteronomistic authors that made Joshua a book of blood.

The Priestly author tackles this from two directions. Firstly he names the nations of Canaan irredeemable corrupt and deserving of complete annihilation. According to the middle chapters of Leviticus, they engage in extreme sexual depravity and idol worship to boot, and the land is so disgusted that it throws them out. The Israelites are the emetic that allows the land to regurgitate these disgusting people. (This graphic language is not mine it is the Bible’s by the way).

But why should the Israelites both an emetic and the palate cleanser so to speak. Why should the Israelites inherit this land that the Canaanites were kicked out of.

The reason is that their ancestors had established legal ownership over much of the land prior to their arrival, specifically over Judah’s most important cities, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Beer-Sheva.