We have been reading the cycle of stories about Abraham (Genesis 12-24) in our class, and wondering why the writer/redactor frames the appropriation of land by Abraham in a way that seems so radically different from that of the Greeks (chs. 20-23). For the Greeks, Plato in the Menexenus, or its parodic author, will have to serve:

The origin of our ancestors is not that of “arrivals,” neither is it to show foreign residents (μετοικοῦντας), settled in this land to which they would have come from elsewhere, but they were autochthonous, inhabiting (οἰκοῦντας) and living authentically in their fatherland, and fed not by a stepmother like the others, but by a mother, the earth where they were inhabitants (οἰκοῦν), and now that they are dead, they rest in the places (οἰκεῖοις τόποις) of her who has begot, fed, and received them.

Compare to Genesis: Abraham the foreign resident, the gêr, who comes from “elsewhere”, self-avowedly “stranger and an alien”, not autochthonous, and who manages to buy a burial cave from Ephron the *Hittite* in 23.10–15!! From as close as he could get to an autochthonous local: “My lord, listen to me; a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.”

As luck would have it, this week, Jewish Studies presents the Gold Foundation Distinguished Lecture on a closely related topic. Ilan Troen, Professor in Israel Studies at Brandeis University, will give the following lecture, “Whose land is it anyway? Theology and secular politics in the land of Israel/Palestine”, this coming Thursday, October 30, 7:00pm, in Humanities 1, Room 210.