A visit to the depths of the Cave of the Patriarchs about 900 years ago

by Professor H. Goethe in Leipzig (translated by David Wiscott)

Several Arab writers know how to tell that the Franks opened and inspected in 1119 the tombs under the mosque in Hebron. On the other hand, information about this unusual act is very sparse in the western sources. The Bolandists mention him briefly in two places and attribute him to the year 1120.

The late Count Ryan published material from a Latin manuscript in which the matter is told at length, under the title Tractatus de inventione sanctorum patriarcharum an article about the finding of the holy patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Ryan sees in him memories that he recorded as an eyewitness not long after the event. According to the content of the manuscript, he states that the author was a 'canonicus', meaning chief singer, of the monastery founded by the 'Latins' in Hebron. Since he does not hand over the manuscript in its entirety in the original Latin, but quotes within his French translation only a few passages in the original language, we lack the tools to examine the attribution of the manuscript. But in light of the proficiency and accuracy evident in all of Ryan Bodai's works, it is permissible to trust his statement. However, in terms of the matter, it is to be regretted that Ryan did not see fit to publish a verbatim copy of the manuscript. As will become clear below, its content raises questions that cannot be decided except according to the full Latin text.

This is the content of the manuscript according to Ryan:

After a short introduction, the author describes the sacred structure erected on the burial cave of the ancestors: "It is built of large hewn stones. The height of the interior space is 18 cubits, its width is 49 cubits. In honor of the ancestors and their wives, six pyramidal tombstones stand here. They stand facing each other." The dimensions and the description of the location of the tombstones correspond to what Pierotti writes in his book Macphelah ou le tombeau des patriarches (Lausanne 1869).

Now comes a brief overview of the history of the city of Hebron. It is opened in the cave by Abraham (Genesis 23). Regarding a legend attributed to the time of Emperor Theodosius. He sent to Palestine to bring the bodies of the three patriarchs to his collection of precious relics in Constantinople. The apostles were beaten with bulls every time they approached the tombstone in Hebron, but were opened every time they retreated. Finally they abandoned their mission. However, they managed to find Joseph's body near Nablus and bring it to Constantinople.

After this trifle, our narrator tells us about the Muslim conquest, the flight of the Greeks, who had blocked the entrance to the tombs before, the investigations of the infidels after him, the betrayal of the Jews, who sold the secret of the entrance against the permission to build a synagogue near the tombs, after that the occupation by the people of the West, The looting of the Muslim temple by one of the archbishops of Apamea and finally the founding of a monastery by Latin shepherds in Hebron.

Only after these things does he arrive at the discovery of the tomb itself, on the date of June of the 21st year of the Frankish kingdom. We do not know any Rosh Hashanah for this account. If it is the 1st of January, or the 1st of Easter 1099, it would have been June back in 1119, but if the writer was appointed to the day of the capture of Jerusalem, July 15th, or to the 23rd of it, which is the day of Gottfried's election, June 21st in 1120 would apply. In any case, it is not very important .

One of the monks prayed during his midday rest at the entrance and felt a cool breeze coming out of the slot between two stone slabs. An examination he conducted revealed that there is a space under the place and its height is 11 cubits. He immediately shared his discovery with his friends at the monastery, who later obtained permission from the lord of the fortress to conduct investigations in that place. After several days, the entrance to an underground room was discovered.

Two of the monks dangled from the rope. The first one came back without doing anything. The second one, his name was Arnold, lit up the room the next day: he looked like he had been carved entirely from one stone, so precisely that he had chiseled without leaving a notch. But with the taps of a hammer he found a place where his voice was hollow. From now on, work continued in this direction.

On the fifth day, the workers encountered the entrance to a kind of aqueduct, which was one cubit wide, seventeen long and eleven high. Here, too, no cracks were visible in the walls. But with the help of a hammer, Arnold discovered a third stone, which was extracted after four days' work. Thus they came from the corridor to a small round basilica, whose ceiling seemed to be made of one single stone and which contained about 30 people.

Here the monks stopped their work and waited for the return of the Prior of the Order, Rainer, who had gone to Jerusalem on the monastery's business. After he returned, they solemnly entered the underground temple. The hope was to find the bodies there or what was left of them, but no traces of them were found. But Arnold discovered near the entrance a stone carved like a cone that was stuck in the Genesis rock and was almost indistinguishable from it. After this stone was removed, the entrance to the true tomb was finally opened.

The first attempt to enter there (June 25) failed, and this is how it was: the prior of the monastery ordered Arnold to take a lighted candle in each hand and enter while praying loudly. But this feared the displeasure of the lord of the fortress of Saint Abraham and convinced the prior of the monastery to ask Baldwin, who was present during the investigations, to accompany him. Baldwin complied with the request. However, as he entered the room after Arnold, he was frightened and fled in a panic. Arnold was left alone, but he searched for the bodies despite all his diligence in vain.

The only noteworthy thing he found was soil that appeared to be soaked in blood. Embarrassed, he returned to his friends. Disheartened, they left the underground room.

The next day, on June 26, the abbot of the monastery ordered the monk Arnold to return to the burial pit and check its bottom carefully. Probing the ground with a stick, he first found the bones (ossa) of Jacob. Without knowing whose they were he collected them. Before him he discovered a blocked entrance to another cave. He opened it and found inside the koch the corpse (corpus signatum) of Abraham, and at the feet of the other the bones (ossa) of Isaac. After that he came out of the cave and informed the head (abt) of the monastery and the monks about his precious find from Pez. Full of enthusiasm they killed the gods with space songs. Arnold now washed the bones in water and wine and laid them separately on boards.

After everyone left, the prior of the monastery sealed the entrance, to ensure that no one would enter there without the permission of the abbot. On the second day after that, some monks stayed at the burial site, to pray. In this they discovered to the right of the entrance some letters carved in stone and showed them to the other monks; But none of them can decipher. They rescued a father She gets married, but they only found land behind her. Convinced that the same address was not there for no reason, they broke through the wall in front of it, to the left of the entrance.

On July 27, they came across about 15 pottery vessels full of bones. The origin of these cannot be determined; However, they were found to agree with the hypothesis that they belong to some of Jacob's older sons.

The head (Prior) of the monastery invited and returned and invited the Patriarch of Jerusalem at the time, Goermundos (1118-1128), to come to Hebron and personally open the presentation of the bones in a festive procession. Since this did not appear, finally on October 6, 1119, the prior of the monastery took the bones out of the crypt in a solemn ceremony, carried them in a procession inside the monastery and presented them before the eyes of the people who gathered in large numbers.

So much for the content of the story according to Ryan. What we learn from him is intriguing and instructive. There are indeed several underground rooms of different shapes and sizes under the floor of the mosque. They are made with art and diligence. They contain bones, some of them in special vessels, others without any packaging. In the stone walls there are letters that the Latin monks of the 12th century did not know.

In the investigation conducted at the time, several rooms were found locked and sealed with the majority of Kasharon. But unfortunately the story does not provide us with sufficient information about the tombs under the Haram. We don't hear anything about whether the test was complete; More the impression arises that she was stopped, something completed. The possibility remains open that there are other rooms or caves besides these under the mosque. Furthermore, we find almost no detail with which we could decide on the time when the rooms were sealed with such a strong closure.

The Latin monks were probably the first to extract the seal stones they found. But who signed the rooms, our narrator himself knows about changes in the tomb rooms that according to him the Greeks and Muslims made. However, the scope of these is not sufficiently clear from what Ryan publishes from the content of the manuscript. According to what Goldziher published in the current volume, page 118, of this journal, it seems that the Muslims had no clear knowledge of the contents of the graves. Lest the sealing stones were put in place at the same time that the building that exists today was built on top of the cave. When will we do this?!

Of interest here is the information found in Rabbi Shmuel bar Shimshon's travelogue (1210), that the "Holy House" - that is, the Crusader entrance 'Holy Abraham' - in Hebron was built 600 years ago. This assertion leads us to the days of Byzantine rule over Palestine, more precisely to the time of Emperor Heraclius; But the number is apparently just rounded. It is appropriate for this that inside the mosque today clear traces of the Byzantine style of construction have been found even now.

The builders of the entrance, which is first mentioned by Antonius Martyr (570) as a basilica with four halls, undoubtedly had to raise the floor in the larger part and enclose it with walls and seal the cave below.

You really look now from inside the mosque, whose floor is 1/4 m higher than the street next to it in the west, down through an opening made like the mouth of a pit and you notice the light of a lantern in the square room below the door, which according to the rumor leads to the cave in the west. If we therefore see that the entrance and the current floor were almost certainly made by the Byzantines, it is true that they were also the ones who sealed the burial chambers and the cave, the access to which was apparently exposed before, and built over them.

But, nothing does the reality of the Latin monks hint us about their age and thus about the time of the sealing that they revealed first of all, the assumption that they found the bones of Jacob and Isaac and the body of Abraham blooms in the air and has nothing to cling to. We do not hear from any nation that they noticed any sign or mark that indicated their identity as so-called remnants of the ancestors. On the contrary, it is said in the commentary that Arnold did not know whose bones he found first. Hence, he found only bones without any identifying mark. This, it must be assumed, was also the case with Isaac's bones.

On the other hand, the phrase used by the narrator regarding Abraham's Gentiles seems doubtful: corpus signatum. Count Ryan translates:

(Arnoul) trouve au fond, et scelle, le corps du saint patriarche Abraham; That is, he interpreted signatum as sigillatum = signed. It is possible, but far from obvious; Because the 'signature' of a corpse, as far as I know, is not an accepted custom. The verb signare indicates first of all some kind of marking. But that this general sense is correct here, it does not appear from the language of the story, as far as it can be established from the translation.

One could expect a message with what the Gentile was marked with. If indeed there was such a sign that indicated the identity of the gentile, such as the name, it would certainly have been, if Arnold or another monk identified the body by it, it is understandable to them; Otherwise, he would have remained an enigma in the eyes of his origin, like the writing that was later discovered on the wall.

However, the story does not at all imply any sign, neither understood nor incomprehensible. Therefore, I assume that here the word signare refers to the meaning that is common in the Middle Ages: to mark with a cross (Lat. signare > Gram. segnen = to bless). Thus, for example, pilgrims and crusaders, who carried the sign of the cross, were called signati for short. signatum corpus will therefore be dead marked with a cross.

From this it can be concluded that Arnold found a Gentile buried there in the Christian era. Or it is also possible that an older error from before the invention of Christianity was reburied, when the tombs were examined, after it was marked with the symbol of Christianity, for example from the assumption that it belonged to Abraham our father, "the father of all believers" (see Epistle to the Romans 4:11, Galatians 3:7) . But according to both assumptions we were forced to attribute all the opacity up to that room where Arnold found the corpus signatum for the Christian era.

In other words: the cave was probably already used before 1,119 as a Christian burial place. As for the vessels full of bones that were recently found, perhaps their presence is explained by the information found in Benjamin of Tudela from the 12th century, that in their burial chamber the ancestors also had vessels in which Jewish bones were buried; Because it is a Jewish custom to bring the bones of deceased relatives there. At the time of the Crusaders, Jews were certainly not allowed to set foot in the cave; Our story denies this. The bones were brought to their place already in previous centuries.

Every reader of this article will not be able to help but be reminded of the stories that the Bible tells in the famous cave of Hebron. That the memory of the place has been preserved over the centuries is certainly evident; only Genesis 23:19 teaches that ancient Hebron It stood "across" the cave, on the western slopes of the valley. It is written in Israel that Abraham buried Sarah there (Genesis 23:9), that he himself was buried there (2:19), followed by Isaac (Le:9), Rebekah, Leah and his body, embalmed according to the Egyptian custom, of Jacob (Matt:11, n :a and onwards).

Comparing this data with the content of the story reveals a striking discrepancy. Already Ryan (p. 419) pointed out that the story does not mention Jacob the embalmed and that the hypothesis is closer that the monks saw Jacob's body as that of Abraham. Without a doubt, one gets the impression that the biblical stories about the cave near Hebron stem from a different reality than the one reflected in the 1119 find.

For the sake of comparison, I bring here what is told by Binyaman of Tudela (11601173) and Rabbi Fethiah (11751180) about the tomb of the ancestors. Under the first name we are told:

"... and in the valley in the field of the Machpelah, there is the city today and there is the great stage that Korin S. Avram and it was the Knesset of the Jews in the days of the Ishmaelites and Esau the Gentiles there are six graves in the name of Abraham and Sarah Isaac and Rebekah Jacob and Leah and they tell the lost that they are the graves of the ancestors and Nanin there is money, but if a Jew comes there he will give a reward to the keeper of a cave and opened for him an iron door that was made from the building of our ancestors and a man went down the stairs with a lighted candle in his hand and went down into one cave and there was nothing there and so did the second one until he came to the third one and here there are six graves the grave of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Sarah and Rebekah and Leah one against the other and their graves are sealed with engraved letters On the grave of Abraham is engraved this is the grave of Abraham and of Isaac this is the grave of Isaac son of Abraham our father and of Jacob this is the grave of Jacob son of Isaac son of Abraham our father and on the others this is Sarah's grave and this is Rebekah's grave and this is Leah's grave and in the cave they light one lamp there every day and every night and night The graves and there are many barrels full of bones from Israel, who used to bring their dead there in the days of Israel, each and every one of his ancestors' bones, and place them there until this day."

We are told about Rabbi Fethiah's journey from Regensburg, probably from the pen of Rabbi Yehuda Hassid, on the tomb of the ancestors in Hebron:

"And he gave gold to the one with the key in the hand of the cave, and brought it to the tomb of the ancestors and opened it for him, and here at the entrance there was a figure and a third person inside, and the Jews in Abak said, be careful because there are three corpses at the beginning of the cave, and they say they are the ancestors and they are not. And he said, I have never allowed any Gentile to enter this gate, and he brought firecrackers and put them inside, and he went down the steps, and before that, the cave from the outside went down fifteen degrees, and he came into a very wide cave, and in the middle of the cave there was an opening in the ground, and the ground is all rock, and all the caves are in the cavity of the rock, and in that opening in the middle are very thick pieces of iron, and there is no A person can do this if it were not for the works of heaven and a storm wind coming out of the holes between the iron and the iron and he could not have come in the night there and realized that it was the place of the ancestors and prayed there and when he was swimming at the mouth of the cave a storm wind would come out and throw him behind him."

It is quite difficult to reconcile these two descriptions with each other, but completely avoiding the collision of what is told in them with what Ryan posted. All in all, it seems to me that the details given there by Rabbi Petahia deserve more trust than those found in Beniman of Tudela; Because it wasn't even said that he visited the cave himself.

Comparing the two descriptions with the Latin story undoubtedly sheds a very positive light on the latter. The reliability of the facts he delivers cannot be doubted. But the more you try to detail it, the stronger the dissatisfaction with the examination that was conducted at the time, at any rate as far as the story is told about it. Below are some points that seem to me worthy of attention.

That the walls of the rooms up to the burial chambers are rock is partly stated explicitly and partly taken for granted, but towards the end, instead of talking about the finding of the fifteen clay barrels, 'stone' and 'wall' are mentioned. How, then, should one draw the location of the rock chambers, where is the original access to them, and where is the outer side where the Latin masters of the entrance began their investigation or where they stopped? The opinion tends to the second option, because a wall is usually built at the entrance to a cave or a burial chamber, and certainly not inside a burial chamber himself.

Also, we do not learn from the story what the Galachs did in the first days of the inspection, before they reached the entrance of a cave. They are chained from above with a rope. Did the cave have a natural opening in its ceiling, was it just an old chimney, or was the original entrance to the cave nothing, there were no stairs leading to it, all these questions remain unanswered, it seems to be the result of a poorly managed investigation. If we had the Latin text in front of us, we could judge this matter with more certainty.

At the end of his article, Ryan raises the question of what happened to the remains found after the opening of the rock chambers. He relies on the knowledge handed down by some Arab writers that the remains were chained back into the burial pit and it was sealed again. But he notes that some parts were apparently preserved and placed on the large platform erected in honor of the three fathers in the place of worship above. Because therefore in 1180 Count Rudolph of Papilendorf sent from the Holy Land to his friend, the abbot Ulrich VI of St. Glenn, according to his request, he was allowed to take the remains of the bodies of the three fathers, which for 10 gold merks - the value of these today, Ryan calculates as more than 131,000 francs - from the entrance stage in Hebron.

If ever in the future a new test - which will then, hopefully, be scientifically accurate - is carried out, almost certainly according to this everything will no longer be found in the same state as it was in 1119. In general, there is almost no information we have about this ancient burial, as few and insufficient as they are, leaving no doubt that the place saw over the centuries not only repeated use, but also investigations at different times.