Genesis 13:18: The address he keeps for the rest of his life

"So Abram moved his tent and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the LORD." This is the last verse of the chapter and the one that gives Abraham a home. Everything since Genesis 12:1 has been movement — Haran, Shechem, the ridge above Bethel, the Negeb, Egypt, back up the ridge, and the parting from Lot. From here on, almost everything that happens to him happens at Hebron or is measured from it. The three visitors come to him at the oaks of Mamre. Sarah laughs behind the tent door there. He stands there in the morning and looks down at the smoke going up from the plain. He buries Sarah there, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him in the same cave. Hebron is about twenty miles south of the camp between Bethel and Ai, further along the same limestone ridge, and at nearly 3,000 feet it is the highest town in the country. It sits on the watershed with the wilderness dropping east to the Dead Sea and the terraced valleys running west toward the plain — good country for a herdsman with as much livestock as Genesis 13 says he has, and defensible. Mamre is not on this map, and it should be said why: the sources tag the oaks of Mamre to Genesis 23 and Genesis 25 and not to this verse, so nothing here invents a point for it. It stands a mile and a half north of the town — close enough that the verse locates it by the town, "which are at Hebron", the way you would give directions to a field. The altar is the third he builds: at Shechem when he first entered the land, on the ridge between Bethel and Ai, and here. Read together they are a line down the spine of Canaan, each one on ground he has been shown and does not own.