Genesis 23:17: A deed read out in full, and its one bearing does not check out

"So the field of Ephron in Machpelah, which was to the east of Mamre, the field with the cave that was in it and all the trees that were in the field, throughout its whole area, was made over…" This is a legal document with a story wrapped round it. Everything a deed of sale needs is here and in the order a deed puts it: the vendor, the parcel, the bearing that identifies it, what stands on it, and the phrase that stops anyone arguing later about where the boundary ran — throughout its whole area. Genesis almost never writes like this. It is doing it because the thing being recorded is the only piece of Canaan Abraham ever owns, bought for four hundred shekels weighed out in front of the whole town by the merchants' weight, and refused as a gift, because a gift can be taken back. The bearing is the part a map can test, and it does not survive the test. The sources put Machpelah at the Cave of the Patriarchs and Mamre three and a half kilometres north at Ramat el-Khalil, which makes the field five hundred metres east of Mamre and three and a half kilometres south of it — a bearing of about a hundred and seventy-two degrees, which is to say very nearly due south and not east at all. On the two minority sites for Mamre it comes out no better: from Ain Sebta the field lies north-east, and from Khirbet Nimreh almost due north. The two dots on this map are three and a half kilometres apart, and every atlas that draws Abraham's life at any useful scale draws them as one. /maps/abrahams-journey leaves both of them unpinned for exactly that reason. At this scale the distance is the whole content, so both get pins and the map is a picture of a sentence and its sources disagreeing by three kilometres about a compass direction. Which does not mean the verse is wrong and the sources are right. "East of Mamre" may be measuring from the oaks rather than the shrine, and Ramat el-Khalil is a Herodian enclosure built over a much older sacred site whose relation to a Bronze Age tent-ground nobody can now check. The map draws what the sources say and lets the gap sit there, the way /maps/genesis-16-14 does with a well that is supposed to lie between two landmarks and does not.