Sarah died at one hundred and twenty-seven years old. The Torah records the number. The Targum records the aftermath: Abraham came from "the mountain of worship"—Mount Moriah, where he had just bound his son—and found her already dead. He had left for the most harrowing test of his life and returned to discover it had killed his wife.
Abraham needed a burial place. He approached the Hittites of Hebron not as a landowner but as a sojourner, a resident alien, requesting the right to purchase a grave. The Hittites responded with honor, calling him "great before the Lord," and offered any tomb he wished. Abraham had a specific site in mind: the "double cave" of Ephron son of Zohar.
The Targum calls it the "cave of Kapheilta"—the doubled cave—a name that later tradition connected to the pairs buried there: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. Abraham insisted on paying full price despite Ephron's offer of a gift. The purchase price was four hundred silver sileen—and the Targum specifies this was silver "good, passing at every table, and receivable in all transactions." This was no casual exchange. Abraham demanded currency that would hold up in any court, making the transaction legally airtight.
This matters because it is one of only three land purchases recorded in the Torah, and the Targum treats every detail of the negotiation with the precision of a legal document. The field, the cave, every tree within its boundaries—all confirmed before witnesses at the city gate. Abraham buried Sarah in the cave at Machpelah, securing the first Jewish-owned plot of land in Canaan through an irreversible, public, fully documented sale. No one could later claim the patriarchs had no stake in the land.