HaShem promises Abraham that He will give the land of Canaan to him and to his descendants. He promises it several times, in detail, and under oath. And yet, when Abraham needs a piece of that land to bury his wife Sara, he does not claim it from God. He buys it.
A Divine promise does not replace human action. It accompanies it and crowns it with success, but it never substitutes for it. The Promised Land has to be acquired, through hishtadlut, a Hebrew word that means “the maximum possible human effort.”
ABRAHAM’S HISHTADLUT
Sara dies in Hebron. Abraham presents himself before the Hittites, the owners of the land. Efron, the owner of the field of Makhpela, offers him the plot as a gift: “A piece of land worth four hundred shekels, between you and me, what is it?” Abraham refuses the gift and, since Efron has already named the price, proceeds to pay it. Without even haggling.
וַיִּשְׁמַ֣ע אַבְרָהָם֮ אֶל־עֶפְרוֹן֒ וַיִּשְׁקֹ֤ל אַבְרָהָם֙ לְעֶפְרֹ֔ן אֶת־הַכֶּ֕סֶף אֲשֶׁ֥ר דִּבֶּ֖ר בְּאׇזְנֵ֣י בְנֵי־חֵ֑ת אַרְבַּ֤ע מֵאוֹת֙ שֶׁ֣קֶל כֶּ֔סֶף עֹבֵ֖ר לַסֹּחֵֽר׃
“Abraham listened to Efron, and Abraham weighed out for Efron the silver he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, certified as valid among merchants.”
Abraham did not want the land as a gift. He did not want Efron’s descendants to come one day to Abraham’s descendants and say: “We gave it to Abraham, but it is ours.”
Abraham paid in “certified” silver, the kind accepted in any market without argument. Paying in the hardest currency of his time closed the deal completely, definitively, with no room for later claims.
And everything was done legally. Abraham closed the transaction at “the city gate,” which was something like the land registry of those days, in front of everyone, as if before a notary public. The purchase was recorded in the registers of the time and, as if that were not enough, in the biblical text itself, which spells out the details of the property: Abraham acquired not only the cave but the entire surrounding property, with its fields and its trees.
Four hundred shekels of silver for that property was a huge overpayment. Excessive. For comparison: centuries later, King David bought the threshing floor of Aravna the Jebusite for fifty shekels, and the prophet Yirmiyahu bought an entire field in the city of Anatot for seventeen.
It is the Jewish people’s first deed of ownership in the land of Israel. And it is recorded in the Bible, a book respected by every monotheistic religion.
RABBI LEVINGER’S HISHTADLUT
Hebron is Ir haAbot, the city of our patriarchs. It is the second holiest city for the Jewish people, after Yerushalayim, and one of the four holy cities of Israel, together with Yerushalayim, Tsefat and Tiberias.
Until 1967 there was not a single Jewish family in Hebron. The Jewish community that had lived there for centuries was destroyed in the pogrom of 1929, in which 67 Jews were murdered. The survivors left, and in 1936 the British evacuated the few who had come back. For the first time in its history, Hebron had no Jews.
On Pesach 1968, less than a year after the Six Day War, Rabbi Moshe Levinger began his remarkable hishtadlut. He arrived with a group of families, many with small children, rented the Park Hotel in Hebron to celebrate the Seder, and never left. The government, which at the time was not especially eager to help these Jewish pioneers, did not know what to do with them. In the end it built them Kiryat Arba, on a hill outside the city. But the city of Hebron itself still had no Jewish residents.
In 1979 a group of women with their children, led by Miriam Levinger, entered Bet Hadassah at night, the old Jewish clinic building abandoned since 1929, and moved in. They lived surrounded by Arab neighbors, many of them hostile. No running water, no electricity, and the army watching from outside.
In May 1980, Palestinian terrorists murdered six young Jews returning from prayers at Makhpela, right in front of Bet Hadassah. After that attack, the government officially authorized the return of Jewish families to the city.
Those were the pioneers. Today, B”H, between 700 and 900 Jews live in Hebron, about a hundred families, in several neighborhoods around the Cave of Makhpela: Abraham Abinu, Bet Hadassah, Bet Romano, Tel Rumeida and Gibat haAbot.
And today Hebron keeps growing the same way the Jewish people have known since Abraham: buying the properties legally, and overpaying.
In February 2026 a new neighborhood opened, HaGebura, in five abandoned buildings that were slated to become an Arab shopping center. They were bought from their owners, and fifteen families already live there. The neighborhood links Kiryat Arba with Abraham Abinu and Bet Hadassah, which were previously cut off.
This week, the organization that bought those buildings reported receiving more offers to sell from Arab owners than ever before. What is missing, they say, is not sellers. It is the funds to buy and redeem those properties.
YOU CAN GET MORE INFORMATION AND DONATE TO THIS “BIBLICAL” CAUSE HERE
YERICHO: THE NEW HISHTADLUT
One more remarkable land acquisition, B”H, took place this week.
Yericho (Jericho) is the famous city the Jews conquered in the days of Yehoshua. But its Jewish history does not end there.
The Torah calls it Ir haTemarim, the city of palms. Its Medjool dates are exported all over the world, and its balsam, the famous tsori of the Pitum haKetoret, was for centuries the most expensive product in the ancient world. Mark Antony gave those groves to Cleopatra, and Herod had to lease them back from her to keep working them.
The Hasmonean kings built their winter palaces there, and Herod enlarged them. Those palaces are still there, excavated, five hundred meters from the houses Jews bought this week.
And in 1936, in Yericho, the mosaic floor of a seventh-century synagogue came to light, with a menora, a shofar, a lulab and, in the center, three words: שלום על ישראל.
Sadly, in 1994 Yericho was the first city Israel handed over to the Palestinian Authority, in the hope of peace agreements that never materialized.
Thirty-two years later, this week, eight Jewish families moved into eight houses on the outskirts of Yericho. This time, deed in hand.
The Nachala movement ran the purchase quietly for months. The families arrived at night. The next morning they put up the mezuzot.
The organizers say they paid the full price and that every property has its title documents. Just as Abraham Abinu did in Hebron.
MEARAT HAMAKHPELA TODAY
The building that stands over the Cave of Makhpela, where our patriarchs are buried, was built by Herod two thousand years ago and is still standing. For seven hundred years, until 1967, Jews were forbidden to enter: they could climb only to the seventh step of the outer staircase.
In July 2025, authority over the maintenance and construction work at Mearat haMakhpela passed from the Hebron municipality, which answers to the Palestinian Authority, to the Jewish Religious Council of Kiryat Arba and Hebron.
It is one of the most important achievements of the Netanyahu government.
The prayer arrangements did not change: the site is still shared by Jews and Muslims.
Rabbi Yosef Bitton
