Genesis Chapter 23

Sarah dies at Hebron, and Abraham, a landless sojourner, buys the cave of Machpelah, his first legal foothold in the land God promised.

Genesis 23:1-2

Sarah’s Death and Abraham’s Mourning

Genesis 23:3-6

A Sojourner Asks for a Grave

Genesis 23:7-11

The Request for Machpelah

Genesis 23:12-16

The Price Named and Paid

Genesis 23:17-20

The Deed and the Burial

Genesis 23:1

The chapter opens with a life measured by its full span: “Sarah was an hundred and seven and twenty years old.” No other woman in Scripture has her age at death recorded. The patriarchs receive such notices (25:7; 35:28; 47:28), and Sarah is placed alongside them. The Hebrew sentence is bracketed by the phrase “the life of Sarah,” at its beginning and again at its close, so that the verse reads like a memorial inscription honoring the woman through whom the promised line came.

The numbers carry their own story. Sarah bore Isaac at ninety (17:17), so her son is now about thirty-seven. Abraham, ten years older than she, is one hundred thirty-seven and will live another thirty-eight years (25:7). The three decades since Isaac’s birth are passed over in silence; the narrative moves directly from Moriah to this graveside. The woman who once laughed in disbelief behind the tent door (18:12) and later laughed for joy at the birth of her son (21:6) lived long enough to see the child of promise grow into a man.

Later Scripture remembers her as a woman of faith. Isaiah points the exiles to “Sarah that bare you” as evidence that God can multiply a family from a single couple (Isaiah 51:2). Hebrews says that she received strength to conceive because she judged God faithful (Hebrews 11:11), and Peter holds her up as a model of hope in God for believing women (1 Peter 3:5-6). The honest record of her failures in Egypt, with Hagar, and at Mamre is not erased; yet the final word on her is a life counted out in full years, every one of them under the care of the God who kept his word to her.

Study Links

Cross References

Genesis 17:17Genesis 21:6

Word / Phrase Notes

חַיֵּי שָׂרָה (ḥayyê Sarah) — the life of Sarah

Hebrew uses a plural form for “life,” and the phrase here stands at both ends of the verse, framing it. Later Jewish tradition named this section of Genesis after these words, an apt title since a chapter about a death begins by speaking twice of life. The same pattern, “these are the days of the years of the life of,” introduces Abraham’s own death notice (25:7), placing Sarah’s memorial on the same footing as the patriarch’s.

Genesis 25:7Genesis 47:28