Mamre


Mamre, full name "Oaks of Mamre", refers to an ancient religious site originally focused on a single holy tree growing "since time immemorial" at Hebron in Canaan. At its first location, Khirbet Nimra, a tree cult predated the biblical narrative. It is best known from the biblical story of Abraham and the three visitors. The tree under which he had pitched his tent is known as the oak or terebinth of Mamre. Modern scholars have identified four sites near Hebron which, in different historical periods, have been successively known as Mamre: Khirbet Nimra, also known as Ayn Nimreh,, Ramat el-Khalil, also known as Haram er-Rama, Deir Al Arba'een complex, and Khirbet es-Sibte. The last one contained an old oak tree identified by a relatively new tradition as the Oak of Mamre, which collapsed in 2019, and is on the grounds of the Church of the Holy Forefathers and Monastery of the Holy Trinity.
Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, as well as Christian and Jewish sources from the Byzantine period, locate Mamre at the site later renamed in Arabic as Ramat el-Khalil, 4 km north of historical Hebron and approximately halfway between that city and Halhul. Herod the Great initiated the Jewish identification of the site with Mamre, by erecting there a monumental enclosure. It was one of the three most important fairs or marketplaces in Judea, where the fair was held next to the venerated tree accompanied by an interdenominational festival celebrated by Jews, pagans, and Christians alike. This prompted Emperor Constantine the Great to unsuccessfully stop this practice by erecting a Christian basilica there.

Hebrew Bible

Names and events

Mamre is the site where Abraham pitched tents for his camp and built an altar in Abraham and Lot's conflict, and was brought divine tidings in the guise of three angels of Sarah's pregnancy in Vayeira#First_reading_–_Genesis_18:1–14|Genesis|18:1-15.
Genesis 13:18 has Abraham settling by 'the great trees of Mamre'. The original Hebrew tradition appears, to judge from a textual variation conserved in the Septuagint, to have referred to a single great oak tree, which Josephus called Ogyges. Mamre may have been an Amorite, a tribal chieftain after whom a grove of trees was named. Genesis connected it with Hebron or a place nearby that city. Mamre has frequently been associated with the Cave of the Patriarchs. According to one scholar, there is considerable confusion in the Biblical narrative concerning not only Mamre, but also Machpelah, Hebron and Kiryat Arba, all four of which are aligned repeatedly. In Genesis, Mamre is also identified with Hebron itself. The Christian tradition of identifying a ruined site surrounded by walls and called in Arabic Rāmet el-Ḥalīl, with the Old Testament Mamre, goes back to the earliest Christian pilgrims in the 4th century CE, and connects to a tradition from the time of Herod.
In Genesis 14:13, it is called 'the Terebinths of Mamre the Amorite', Mamre being the name of one of the three Amorite chiefs who joined forces with those of Abraham in pursuit of Chedorlaomer to save Lot.
The supposed discrepancy is often explained as reflecting the discordance between the different scribal traditions behind the composition of the Torah, the former relating to the Yahwist, the latter to the Elohist recension, according to the classic formulation of the documentary hypothesis.

Identification

There appear to be four main sites which have been known, at different times in history, as Mamre. These are, chronologically:
  1. Khirbet Nimra or Ayn Nimreh, an archaeological site next to Hebron and 1.5 km south of Ramat el-Khalil, identified as the Mamre of Achaemenid Judea and the subsequent Hellenistic period.
  2. Ramat el-Khalil, also spelled Ramet el-Khulil, and also known as Haram er-Rama, is the site identified as Mamre in the time of King Herod, Constantine the Great, and – strongly contested by some – the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Talmudic sources refer to the site as Beth Ilanim or Botnah. The ruins of the Herodian and Constantinian structure also became known in Arabic as Beit el-Khalil "Abraham's House".
  3. Deir el Arba'een: a tradition that flourished from the 16th century down to the commencement of the 19th century, now almost forgotten, pointed to the hill of Deir el Arba'een as that of Mamre, relying especially, no doubt, in its inception on the identity of Mamre and Hebron. The site agrees well with the statement that the cave of Machpelah was "before," i.e. to the East of Mamre. A magnificent terebinth which stood there was pointed out as that of Abraham.
  4. Khirbet es-Sibte, the present-day site of the so-called Oak of Mamre, 2 km southwest of Ramat el-Khalil, has been considered since the 19th century by Christians to be the place where Abraham saw the angels. A modern Russian Orthodox monastery is marking the site.

    History and archaeology

Khirbet Nimra: Persian and Hellenistic Mamre

According to Abel and Jericke among others, Persian and Hellenistic Mamre was located at Khirbet Nimra, 2 km north of the Cave of Machpelah, inside the modern Hebron, where a pagan tree cult, supposedly, predates the biblical account of the Abraham.

Ramat el-Khalil

Research and analysis

The archaeological site of Ramat el-Khalil was first excavated by in 1926–1928, followed by Sayf al-Din Haddad, 'Abd el-Aziz Arjub, and Yitzhak Magen, Magen publishing his findings in 1991 and 2003. Greenberg & Keinan, summarising previous dig reports, list the outstanding components of the site as being a large Roman-era enclosure, a Byzantine church, and a Crusader church.
However, Denys Pringle's analysis of both historical and archaeological sources leads to the firm conclusion that the Crusader-era Church of the Trinity, mentioned by pilgrims in 1170, stood at the foot of a hill, not at its top, and certainly not at Ramat el-Khalil, where the remains of the Constantinian church were found undisturbed by any later building in 1926.
Greenberg & Keinan list the main periods of settlement as Early Roman, Late Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader, with less substantial findings from the Iron Age IIc era and the Hellenistic period. However, Yitzhak Magen, the last to excavate the site, claims that findings previously attributed to the biblical-era kings the Iron Age, and the Hellenistic Hasmonean dynasty, are in fact of far newer date: Byzantine or later.

Bronze Age

Early Bronze Age pottery sherds found at the Ramat el-Khalil site may indicate that a cultic shrine of some kind was in use from 2600–2000 BCE, but there is no archaeological evidence for the site being occupied from the first half of the second millennium down to the end of the Iron Age – that is, very broadly speaking, between 2000 and 600 BCE.

Herod: the enclosure

transferred the Mamre tradition 2.5 km to the north, from the site at Khirbet Nimra to the site at Ramet el-Khalil. This was part of Herod's upgrade of Hebron as a cult centre dedicated to the patriarch Abraham, by erecting two shrines: one at Abraham's tomb, and one at a site he connected to his place of residence, where the patriarch dined under a tree together with the three men. It has been noted that Hebron and Mamre were located in Idumaean territory, that both Jews and Idumaeans regarded Abraham as their common ancestor, and that Herod came from an Idumaean family that had only recently converted to Judaism.
The 2 m thick stone wall enclosing an area 49 m wide and 65 m long was constructed by Herod, possibly as a cultic place of worship. It contained an ancient well, more than 5 m in diameter, referred to as Abraham's Well.

Josephus: the terebinth

Josephus records a tradition according to which the terebinth at Mamre was as old as the world itself. The site was soaked in legend. Jews, Christians and Pagans made sacrifices on the site, burning animals, and the tree was considered immune to the flames of the sacrifices. Constantine the Great was still attempting, without success, to stop this tradition.

Late Roman period: Hadrian's temple

The Herodian structure was destroyed by Simon bar Kokhba's army, only to be rebuilt by the Roman emperor Hadrian. Hadrian revived the fair, which had long been an important one as it took place at an intersection forming the transport and communications nub of the southern Judean mountains. This mercatus or "fair, market" was one of the sites, according to a Jewish tradition conserved in Jerome, chosen by Hadrian to sell remnants of Bar Kochba's defeated army into slavery. Jerome, in his commentary on the Book of Jeremiah, writes:

Rabbinical tradition

The Chazal, the early rabbis, condemned the fairs due to idolatry. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, Avodah Zarah 1:4:4:

Late Roman festival and Byzantine basilica

and Sozomen describe how, notwithstanding the rabbinic ban, by the time of Constantine the Great's reign, the market had become an informal interdenominational festival, in addition to its functions as a trade fair, frequented by Christians, Jews and pagans. The cultic shrine was made over for Christian use after Eutropia, Constantine's mother-in-law, visited it and was scandalised by its pagan character. Constantine, informed of these pagan practices, attempted without success to put an end to the festive rituals celebrated around the tree. He angrily wrote to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem and all the other bishops of Palestine and admonished them, letting them know that he had ordered the comes Acacius to destroy all pagan idols and punish those holding on to pagan practices. The enclosure was then consecrated, Constantine had a basilica built, dedicated to Saint George, and the enclosure of the Terebinth of Mamre roofed over.
The 1957 plan and reconstruction of the site made after the excavation performed by German scholar A. E. Mader in 1926–1928, shows the Constantinian basilica along the eastern wall of the Haram Ramet el-Khalil enclosure, with a well, altar, and tree in the unroofed western part of the enclosure.
The venerated tree was destroyed by Christian visitors taking souvenirs, leaving only a stump which survived down to the seventh century.
The fifth-century account by Sozomen is the most detailed account of the practices at Mamre during the early Christian period.
A vignette of the Constantinian basilica with its colonnaded atrium appears on the 6th-century Madaba Map, under the partially preserved Greek caption "Arbo, also the Terebinth. The Oak of Mambre".
Antoninus of Piacenza in his Itinerarium, an account of his journey to the Holy Land comments on the basilica, with its four porticoes, and an unroofed atrium. Both Christians and Jews worshipped there, separated by a small screen. The Jewish worshippers would flock there to celebrate the deposition of Jacob and David on the day after the traditional date of Christ's birthday.
The Constantinian basilica was destroyed during the Sasanian conquest of Jerusalem of 614.