The Mekhilta continues cataloguing everything God showed Moses from Mount Pisgah. The question this time: how do we know that God showed him even the graves of the forefathers?
The clue is hidden in the word "the south." When the verse describes what Moses saw — "and the south" (Deuteronomy 34:3) — the Mekhilta connects it to another passage about the south: "And they went up into the south, and they came to Hebron" (Numbers 13:22). That verse describes the spies who scouted the land of Canaan and made their way to Hebron, the ancient city where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are all buried in the Cave of Machpelah.
By linking these two verses through the shared reference to "the south," the Mekhilta concludes that when Moses looked southward from the mountaintop, he was seeing Hebron — and specifically, the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs.
This detail adds an extraordinary layer of emotion to Moses' final vision. He was not only seeing the future of the nation — the tribal territories, the Temple, David's kingdom — but also the past. He saw where his ancestors lay buried in the earth, the physical resting places of the people whose covenant he had spent his life fulfilling. Moses stood on one mountain looking at graves he would never visit, belonging to forefathers whose promise he had carried but could not complete. Even the dead were in the land. Only Moses remained outside.