Cave of the Patriarchs

Cave of the Patriarchs, or Sanctuary of Abraham, holy site believed to be the resting place of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob, located in the West Bank city of Hebron. Hebron’s Old City is built around the tomb complex, which is a place of pilgrimage for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and the city’s Hebrew name (Ḥevron) and Arabic name (Al-Khalīl) both refer to Abraham’s epithet as “the friend of God.” The site is considered the holiest place in Judaism after the Temple Mount.

Jewish and Islamic traditions

The significance of the site is described in Genesis, where the biblical patriarch Abraham purchases the cave of Machpelah from the Hittites as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, after she dies at a location nearby (Genesis 23). The transaction is the first instance recounted in the Hebrew Bible of land ownership by Abraham or his descendants in the land of Canaan. Genesis later describes the burial of Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob in the cave. In the Jewish tradition the Midrash text Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer adds that before Sarah’s death Abraham had already set his sights on the cave after discovering the burial place of Adam and Eve inside. The Zohar, the classic text of Jewish mysticism, relates that Abraham also witnessed the entrance to the Garden of Eden in the cave. In Islamic lore Solomon—who, according to the Qurʾān, commanded armies of jinn (beings of smokeless flame), humans, and birds—ordered jinn to construct the edifice around the cave. Some accounts of the Isrāʾ (Muhammad’s night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem) suggest that Muhammad visited the site during his journey.

Construction and administration

The oldest part of the Cave of the Patriarchs complex, which today includes several structures adjoining the burial cave, is the enclosure around the tombs. The enclosure’s architecture is markedly Herodian (1st century bce–1st century ce), and its construction is typically attributed to Herod the Great (reigned 37–4 bce), who undertook a stylistically similar reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem on a grand scale. The enclosure is the only Herodian structure that stands fully intact in the modern era. The main prayer hall of the current complex was built in the 12th century as a Romanesque church, constructed atop the site of an earlier mosque that was destroyed in the Crusades. The church was then converted back into a mosque after the Ayyubids took control of the city later that century, but the Ayyubids allowed Christian pilgrims continued access to holy sites in accordance with the treaty that ended the Third Crusade. Under Mamluk rule (1260–1516) access was restricted to Muslims. After Israel occupied the West Bank in the Six-Day War (1967), the Israeli military administration allowed Jews to visit and worship while permitting the existing Islamic waqf (trust) to continue its longstanding management of the shared holy site.

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Since the 1990s management and security of the complex have been a particular source of tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In September 1993 Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed a historic declaration, known as the Oslo I Accord, that set out a framework for Palestinian self-governance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including Hebron, with matters such as holy site access to be determined at a later date. In February of the following year, during the overlap of the Jewish festival of Purim and the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the site, killing 29 and wounding about 125. As a security measure, the prayer hall was then partitioned with nearly two-thirds of the space allocated to Jewish worshippers and the remaining third allocated to Muslim worshippers. Interim security arrangements specific to Hebron, including Israeli security around the Cave of the Patriarchs complex, were bilaterally outlined in an annex to the Oslo II Accord (1995) and put into effect after the conclusion of the Hebron Protocol (1997). In 2025, amid a series of provocative policies by Israeli cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich to expand settlement activity in the West Bank, the Israeli military administration transferred at least some management responsibilities of the complex from the Islamic waqf to a Jewish religious council, which soon afterward began carrying out structural renovations.