Keturah and the Death of Abraham

Abraham lives on, takes another wife, fathers six more sons, and dies at a hundred and seventy-five, "full of years" — not merely long-lived, but complete, satisfied. And the closing image is one the text offers without a word of commentary: Isaac and Ishmael, the son of the covenant and the son sent into the desert, bury their father together at Machpelah. Grief does, for a day, what decades of division could not. Matthew eight will later use table-fellowship "with Abraham" as shorthand for the Gentile inclusion Jesus is announcing, and Luke's parable of the rich man and Lazarus keeps "Abraham's bosom" as the picture of the righteous dead well into the first century. The name outlives the man by a very long way — which, if you've followed the argument all the way through, is exactly what was promised to him back in chapter twelve, before he'd taken a single step out of Haran.