Genesis 25:9: Two sons at one grave, on the only ground he ever owned

"Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre…" The two names at the front of this sentence have not been in the same verse since the day the younger was circumcised, fifty-odd years and a whole quarrel earlier. Ishmael was sent out into the wilderness of Beersheba with a skin of water; Isaac was carried up a mountain with the wood on his back. The text has kept them a hundred and fifty miles apart ever since — one in Paran with an Egyptian wife, the other in the Negeb at Hagar's well — and it puts them side by side here without a word of explanation, in the order of who inherits and not of who was born. Everything else in the verse is the deed of Genesis 23 read back out. The cave, the field, Ephron son of Zohar, the Hittite, east of Mamre: the same clauses in the same order, because the point of buying it in front of witnesses was that it would still be his when this day came. He is the second person into it. Sarah has been there thirty-eight years. The map is the pair of dots from /maps/genesis-23-17 at a slightly wider setting — the cave eight hundred metres east of Hebron's tell, the oaks three and a half kilometres north — and the bearing in the sentence is the same bearing that did not work then. What has changed is who is standing there. This is the last verse in the series in which Abraham is present, and he is present as a body. Genesis gives him no eulogy and no last words. The verse before this one is the whole obituary: he breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. Then two sons, a field, and a hole in the rock.