Genesis 35:27: Home, with everyone who was owed the journey dead but one

"And Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre, or Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned." Twenty years in Paddan-aram, a night wrestling at the Jabbok, a reconciliation with Esau, a massacre at Shechem and two burials on the road — Deborah under the oak at Bethel, Rachel on the way to Ephrath — and Jacob finally walks up into the Hebron hills and finds his father alive. The verse gives the place three names in one breath, and the piling-up is the point. Mamre is where Abraham pitched by the oaks and was told he would have a son; Kiriath-arba, the city of four, is what the Canaanites called it and what Sarah died in; Hebron is what it is called now. The narrator is saying: this is the ground, under all of its names, and both the men before you lived on it. Where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned — sojourned, not owned. The only piece of it the family holds outright is the field at Machpelah with the cave in it, bought for four hundred shekels to bury a wife. Isaac is the one who has not moved. Jacob left him at Beersheba and comes back to him thirty miles north at Mamre, an old man gone blind at the start of chapter 27 and still alive at the end of chapter 35 — the deceived father outliving the deception by twenty years, and by the reckoning the chapter gives him, outliving Rachel and never knowing what happened at Shechem. Two pins, because the sources give two. Mamre takes 526 votes at Ramat el-Khalil, a walled enclosure with an ancient well and a terebinth tradition two miles north of the town; Hebron takes 500 at Tel Rumeida, the old mound under the modern city. They are about two and a half miles apart, and the verse treats them as one address. What happens next is the last two verses of the chapter, and Esau comes back for them.