What’s inside the sealed cave where Abraham was buried?
The opening in the floor was just 28 cm wide, too small for any grown man.
So, in October of 1968 in the city of Hebron, they lowered a 12-year-old girl into the darkness on a rope.
She carried a flashlight and a camera.
Above her, a building that had kept this space sealed for centuries.
Below her, a place that according to tradition holds the graves of Abraham and Sarah.
Her name was Mikall.
And what she saw down there is one of the few eyewitness descriptions we have of what lies beneath one of the most sacred buildings on Earth.
And she wasn’t the first to try.
Eight centuries earlier, a traveler from Spain wrote that he had walked into the cave himself by candle light and read names carved on the tombs.
Abraham is honored by more than half of humanity.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all look back to him.
And yet, the place where tradition says he lies has been closed to almost everyone for most of the last 2,000 years.
No archaeologist has ever been allowed to properly excavate it.
What we know comes from a handful of people who went down and a building that refuses to give up its secrets.
A sealed cave at the center of three faiths.
If hidden places like this fascinate you, subscribe to Cities Uncovered because the deeper we go, the stranger this gets, let’s start with the building that guards it.
Stand in Hebrron today, about 30 km south of Jerusalem, and look up.
A massive stone enclosure rises above the old city.
[music] It’s around 60 m long and 34 m wide.
Its walls are more than 2 and 1/2 m thick.
Some of its stones are over 7 m long, cut and fitted without mortar.
Most scholars believe it was built by Herod the Great around 2,000 years ago.
The same king who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem.
And here’s the surprising part.
In Jerusalem, Herod’s temple was destroyed.
Almost everything he built across the land has fallen, burned, or been buried.
But this enclosure in Hebron is still standing, nearly complete.
It’s often described as the only Herodian building that survives almost intact.
If you’ve seen the Western Wall in Jerusalem, it looks strangely familiar.
The same huge blocks, the same carefully carved edges around each stone, the same flat plasters running up the walls.
And originally, it seems there was no roof at all, just an open courtyard with the sacred ground in the middle and the sky above.
Less than a century after Herod, the historian Favius Josephus wrote that the monuments of the patriarchs could still be seen at Hebron, made of beautiful marble and finely crafted.
He also mentions a giant Terabinth tree near the city, which locals claimed had been standing since the creation of the world.
Three centuries later, an anonymous Christian pilgrim from Bordeaux in what is now France traveled to the Holy Land in the year 333 and kept a travel diary.
When he reached Hebron, he described a square monument of stone of wonderful beauty where he wrote Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah were laid.
The same walls already ancient, already sacred.
But Herod didn’t build the cave.
He built a fortress of stone around it.
And Hebron wasn’t the only place he built one.
A few kilometers to the north at a site called Me, where Genesis says Abraham once pitched his tent under the great trees, archaeologists found another enclosure in the same Herodian style.
Centuries later, the emperor Constantine ordered a church to be built there, too.
Abraham’s footsteps were being marked in stone.
Why would Herod care so much?
One theory points to his own family.
Herod came from Idamea, the region around Hebron, and its people trace their ancestry, according to tradition, to Esau, Abraham’s grandson.
Honoring Abraham may have been a way of honoring a shared ancestor and of winning the loyalty of the people who lived there.
So, the real question is older.
Why did anyone believe that Abraham was buried here in the first place?
The answer begins with a funeral.
According to the book of Genesis, Abraham’s wife Sarah died in Hebron at the age of 127.
And Abraham came, the text says, to mourn for her and to weep.
Abraham was a foreigner in the land.
He owned nothing, not even a place to bury the woman he had loved.
For a lifetime.
So he went to the people of the city and asked to buy a cave.
A cave at the end of a field owned by a man named Ephron the Hitittite.
The Bible calls it the cave of Makpalah.
Even the name is a small mystery.
Makpalah is often understood to mean double.
Some ancient Jewish interpreters took it to mean a double cave, one chamber inside another.
Others thought it referred to the couples buried there.
Keep that word in mind.
Double.
It will come back.
What follows is one of the most detailed business negotiations in the ancient world.
Ephron offers to give the field away.
Abraham insists on paying.
Ephron finally names a price, 400 shekels of silver, and Abraham weighs out the silver in front of witnesses at the gate of the city.
Why such a careful contract?
Because in the ancient world, a grave was a claim.
A family that buried its dead in a place belonged to that place.
Abraham wasn’t just buying a cave.
He was putting down roots in a land where he was still a stranger.
It’s often called the first recorded purchase of land in the Bible.
And it wasn’t just any land.
It was a family grave.
According to Genesis, Abraham was later buried there by his sons Isaac and Ishmael.
Then Isaac and his wife Rebecca.
Then Jacob’s wife Leah.
And finally, Jacob himself, who as he was dying in Egypt, made his sons promise to carry his body all the way back to this cave.
Genesis describes that last journey in remarkable detail.
A huge procession of Egyptian officials, chariots, and horsemen traveling with Joseph and his brothers to bury their father.
The Egyptians, it says, mourned Jacob for 70 days.
Six people, three couples, one cave.
Think about how unusual that is.
Abraham’s family wandered for generations.
They lived in tents.
They moved from place to place, but they all came back to the same spot when they died.
So, was there really an ancient city here in the time when these stories are set?
To find out, archaeologists didn’t dig under the sacred building.
They couldn’t.
Instead, they went to a hill just across the valley called Telrada.
That’s where ancient Hebron actually stood.
And what they found there is impressive.
Huge city walls built from enormous rough stones dating to the middle bronze age roughly 4,000 to 3 and a half thousand years ago the same broad period in which many readers place the stories of Abraham then in 1986 during excavations led by the Israeli archaeologist Avi a small clay tablet turned up it was written in kuni form the wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia the same writing used in the land Abraham is said to have come from.
The tablet is dated to roughly the 17th century BC.
It seems to be an administrative record listing animals, possibly for offerings along with the names of several people.
Some of those names aren’t local at all.
They point to peoples from the north.
It doesn’t mention Abraham.
Nobody should pretend it does, but it shows that Hebron in that distant age was a real walled city connected to the wider world where foreigners lived and scribes kept records in a Mesopotamian script and Hebron kept its importance.
[music] Centuries later, the book of 2 Samuel says that David was first crowned king in Hebron and ruled from there for 7 years before he ever moved to Jerusalem.
And Hebron’s name has literally turned up in the ground.
Across ancient Judah, archaeologists have found the handles of large storage jars stamped with a seal reading belonging to the king, followed by one of four city names.
One of those names is Hebron.
These jars are usually dated to the time of King Hezekiah around 27 centuries ago.
Even the Bible seems proud of how old Hebron was.
The book of numbers notes that it was built 7 years before Zoan, a royal city in Egypt.
Hebron is one of the oldest cities in the region still lived in today.
And at its heart, the cave never moved.
But for a very long time, almost nobody was allowed to see it.
And this is where the story turns because somewhere under that floor there’s a staircase.
It climbs toward the light and it ends in a solid wall.
To understand who sealed it, walk through the history of the building above the cave and you see the story of the region itself.
In the Bzantine period, Christians built a church inside Herod’s enclosure.
Around the year 500 70, a pilgrim from Piaenza in Italy described it.
He wrote that a screen ran down the middle of the building.
Christians entered on one side, Jews on the other, and both burned incense to honor the patriarchs.
One building, two communities divided by a screen more than 14 centuries ago.
After the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, it became a mosque.
The crusaders turned it back into a church.
And after Saladin’s victory in the late 12th century, it became a mosque again.
Even the name of the building depends on who you ask.
Jews call it the cave of the patriarchs and consider it the second holiest site in the world after the temple mount.
Muslims call it the sanctuary of Abraham.
Christian pilgrims in the Middle Ages simply called the whole town St.
Abraham.
Inside the hall, large memorial monuments stand on the floor, each one dedicated to one of the patriarchs or matriarchs.
They’re called cenotavs from a Greek word meaning an empty tomb.
Many visitors think these are the tombs.
They’re not.
According to tradition, the real burial cave lies below beneath the stone floor.
And over the centuries, its entrances were sealed.
Then in the year 1267, the Mamlick Sultan Babbars imposed a rule that would last for about 700 years.
Jews and Christians were not allowed to enter the building.
They could climb the outside staircase only as far as the seventh step and pray from there.
The seventh step for seven centuries.
Picture it.
Generations of pilgrims traveling hundreds of kilometers to stand outside a wall, touching a stone stair, looking up at a building they would never enter, above a cave none of them would ever see.
But before that rule came into force, a few people did go down and one of them left a story that still sounds almost unbelievable.
It’s the year 1119.
Hebron is in crusader hands and the town is known to Europeans as the castle of St.
Abraham.
The building is a church cared for by a community of monks.
According to an account written by one of those monks, something strange happened.
While working inside, they noticed a current of air coming up from between the stones of the floor.
Air from underground in a sealed building.
They began to tap and dig.
They found an opening and then a passage and they went down.
According to their account, they found a cave and then another and inside them bones.
The monks believed they had found the remains of the patriarchs themselves.
They described carefully gathering the bones and then sealing the cave again.
Is their story accurate?
We can’t know for sure.
It’s a medieval account written by people who deeply wanted to find what they found.
But it tells us something important.
900 years ago, people already believed there was a real physical space under that floor.
Not a legend, a cave you could walk into.
And a few decades later, a visitor would describe that space in even more detail.
Around the year 1170, a Jewish traveler named Benjamin of Tudela from the Kingdom of Navar in what is now Spain set out on a long journey across the Mediterranean world.
He kept a record of the cities he visited, a book known today simply as his itinerary, and one of them was Hebron.
He writes that the Christians showed visitors six tombs in the church above, but for a payment, the guards would take Jewish visitors to the real cave.
According to Benjamin, they went through an iron door and down a passage holding burning candles.
They passed through a first cave, empty, then a second, also empty, and then a third.
There, he says, were six tombs with the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah written on them, and a lamp burning day and night above the graves.
He also mentions something stranger, barrels full of bones, which he says Jewish families had brought there over the years so that their loved ones could rest near the patriarchs.
This is the traveler from the beginning of our story, the one who said he read the names.
Did he really see those inscriptions or did the guards show him something else?
Or did he repeat what others told him?
Historians still debate how much of his book comes from his own eyes, but his description, three caves, one leading into the next, matches the idea of a real underground complex, a cave within a cave.
Exactly what that old word macha seemed to suggest.
Then the doors closed for 700 years until the night they lowered a child into the dark.
After the war of 1967, Hebrron came under Israeli control and the old seventhstep rule ended.
Mosha Dian, then Israel’s defense minister, had a famous passion for archaeology and he wanted to know what was under the floor.
Inside the hall near the senotalf of Isaac, there was a small round opening about 28 cm across.
No adult could fit through it.
It was barely wider than a dinner plate.
So, in October of 1968, Mikal, the slim 12-year-old daughter of an army officer, was chosen.
She was tied to a rope and lowered down through the hole with a flashlight in her hand.
She landed in a small square room cut into the rock a few meters wide.
And inside she saw three stone slabs standing like gravestones, one in the middle, two at the sides.
Then she found a passage, narrow, leading away from the room [music] and at its end a staircase of stone steps going up.
The stairs ended at a wall of stones, sealed, as if someone long ago had blocked the way between the cave and the building above.
She took photographs, made notes, and was pulled back up through the hole.
Diane later wrote about her descent in his book, Living with the Bible, and her sketches became one of the very few records of what lies beneath the floor.
I keep thinking about that moment.
A child alone hanging in the dark with a flashlight in a place that kings, monks, and pilgrims had argued over for thousands of years.
But notice what she didn’t find.
She didn’t reach the deeper caves.
The room she entered seems to be a kind of entrance chamber.
The burial caves described by the monks and by Benjamin of Tudella, if they’re there, lie beyond.
Did anyone ever go farther?
In 1981, a small group of Israelis entered through another shaft at night.
One of them, Noam Arnan, later described what they saw.
A passage cut into the rock.
Underground chambers, fragments of ancient pottery, which they believed were thousands of years old.
But their visit was brief and unofficial.
No full excavation followed.
No scientific team has ever studied the caves in detail.
And to this day, the deepest chambers have never been fully explored or published.
Today, the building is divided between a mosque and a synagogue with each community praying in its own section under tight security.
And the cave below remains sealed.
So, what’s inside the sealed cave where Abraham was buried?
[music] Here’s what we can say.
Above it stands a giant Herodian enclosure, 2,000 years old, still almost intact.
Across the valley, ancient Hebron had powerful walls and scribes writing in Kune form in the age many associate with Abraham.
Monks in the 12th century said a breath of air led them down into caves filled with bones.
A traveler from Spain described three caves and six names.
And a 12-year-old girl found a hidden room, three standing slabs, and a staircase sealed in stone.
What we can’t say is just as important.
No one has opened the deepest chambers with modern methods.
No one has scientifically studied what lies inside.
Maybe that’s fitting because the oldest story connected with this cave isn’t about treasure or secrets.
It’s about a man burying his wife.
Abraham was a foreigner who owned nothing in that land.
When Sarah died, he didn’t conquer a city or build a monument.
He bought a quiet cave at the edge of a field, paid in full in front of witnesses so that his family would have a place to rest together.
Thousands of years later, kings built walls around it.
Empires fought over it.
Pilgrims stood on the seventh step and wept and a child went down into the dark with a flashlight.
All because one family wanted to stay together, even in death.
Maybe that’s the real double in Machella.
Not two caves, but two people side by side waiting together.
If you could go down into that cave for just 1 hour, what would you want to look for first?
The names on the tombs, the end of that sealed staircase, or the place where Abraham laid Sarah to rest.
Tell me in the comments.
And to keep uncovering the places where history and faith meet, subscribe to Cities Uncovered.
