“Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead.”
Abraham bows down before the Hittites and asks them to intercede with Ephron son of Zohar so that he will sell him the cave of Machpelah at the end of his field — at full price. The request is for purchase, not gift. Abraham declines the offer of the choicest tomb freely given and insists on paying full price. The same refusal of gifts that characterized his response to the king of Sodom in Genesis 14:23 is operative here: he will not receive as a gift what he can buy, because the title must be unambiguous. The application: sometimes paying full price is the right response to a generous offer, because outright ownership is more secure than gift-indebtedness.
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