Genesis 23:18

Sarah dies, and Abraham, who still owns none of the promised land, buys a field with a cave at Machpelah from the Hittites to bury her. Asking for the grave, he opened with the plain truth about himself: "I am a foreigner and an outsider among you" (Genesis 23:4). More than sixty years earlier God had appeared to him in this land and said, "I will give this land to your offspring" (Genesis 12:7). Later the promise widened to "all the land of Canaan, as an eternal possession" (Genesis 17:8). After all those years on that promise, Abraham owned none of it, and had to ask the neighbours for somewhere to bury his wife.

An oath called God as witness to a promise, and the seven lambs were a public sign of it, a witness anyone could see. Treaties in the ancient Near East were sworn before gods. Hittite treaties end with long lists of them, called to witness and to punish whichever side broke faith. Abimelech asks for the same protection in one line: "swear to me here before God" (Genesis 21:23). And he wants it to reach to his children and descendants, three generations, which is exactly what a king's treaty tried to do.

To possess the gates meant to rule a city, because the gate was where its court sat and where it was defended. The blessing Rebekah's family gave her turns on two words. The first is sha'ar (H8179), the gate. In a walled city of the ancient Near East the gate was the town square and the court. Elders sat there and cases were heard there. One chapter earlier Abraham bought his burial cave "in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of his city" (Genesis 23:18). Whoever held the gate held the city's justice and its defence.