Biblion Bible Commentary
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Abraham's death, and Ishmael's generations
Genesis 25:1-18
1 Abraham took another wife, and her name was Keturah. · WEB
The man who was promised the world dies owning a cave, and two estranged sons bury him together.
Abraham lives on after Sarah, marries again, and has six more sons by Keturah. It is a surprising postscript to a story about a hundred-year-old man who could not have children, and it is recorded without comment.
How he handles the inheritance is careful and is the pattern he has followed before. Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac, but Abraham gave gifts to the sons of Abraham's concubines. While he still lived, he sent them away from Isaac his son, eastward. Provision for all of them, settled during his lifetime so that nothing could be disputed after it, and a clear line: one heir of the covenant, and the others sent off with their portions. The same distinction was made with Ishmael — blessed, given a nation, and not the line.
The death notice is dignified and its phrases are formulaic: Abraham gave up his spirit, and died at a good old age, an old man, and full of years, and was gathered to his people.
That last idiom is worth a note, because it is often read as a statement about where the dead go. It is used here of a man whose relatives were buried nine hundred miles away in Ur and Haran, and who is himself laid in a cave in Canaan — so it plainly cannot mean joining his ancestors in a family tomb, and equally plainly it is not making a claim the narrative goes on to explain. It is Hebrew's ordinary way of saying that a person has died and joined the generations that went before, and this book's own account of what happens at death is the one given in the garden: the dust returns to the ground Genesis 3:19.
What happened to the promises is worth setting out plainly, because the summary is startling. He was promised a land, and he owned a field with a cave in it. He was promised offspring like the stars, and he died with two sons who mattered and six who were sent east. He was promised that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him, and nothing of the kind had visibly begun.
And Scripture's verdict on him is that he believed God, and that it was credited to him as righteousness Genesis 15:6. Whatever faith is in this book, it is not the same thing as receiving what was promised.
Then a detail that repays attention: Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him in the cave of Machpelah. The two of them, together. Ishmael was sent into the wilderness with a container of water when Isaac was weaned, and the brothers have not appeared in the same verse since. At their father's grave they are named side by side, and nothing is said about how that came about.
The section closes with Ishmael's own generations — twelve princes, exactly as promised Genesis 17:20 — and with his death recorded in the same formula as his father's. Genesis regularly clears the non-covenant line off the stage before following the chosen one, and it does so here with the promises to that line reported as kept.
held with reason What this mark means