Mamre (; ), full Hebrew name Elonei Mamre ("Oaks/Terebinths of Mamre"), refers to an ancient religious site originally focused on a single holy tree, growing "since time immemorial" at Hebron in Canaan. It is known from the biblical story of Abraham and the three visitors. The tree under which he had pitched his tent is known as the oak or terebinth of Mamre. Modern scholars have identified three sites near Hebron which, in different historical periods, have been successively known as Mamre: Khirbet Nimra (a little excavated Persian and Hellenistic period site), Ramat el-Khalil (the best known site), and Khirbet es-Sibte. The last one contained an old oak tree identified by a relatively new tradition as the Oak of Mamre, which has collapsed in 2019, and is on the grounds of a Russian Orthodox monastery.
Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, as well as Christian and Jewish sources from the Byzantine period, locate Mamre at the site later renamed in Arabic as Ramat el-Khalil, 4 km north of historical Hebron and approximately halfway between that city and Halhul. Herod the Great apparently initiated the Jewish identification of the site with Mamre, by erecting there a monumental enclosure. It was one of the three most important "fairs" or market places in Judea, where the fair was held next to the venerated tree, accompanied by an interdenominational festival joined in time by Jews, pagans, and Christians. This prompted Emperor Constantine the Great to unsuccessfully attempt at putting a stop to this practice by erecting a Christian basilica there.
Hebrew Bible
Names and events
Mamre is the site where Abraham pitched the tents for his camp, built an altar (), and was brought divine tidings, in the guise of three angels, of Sarah's pregnancy ().
Genesis 13:18 has Abraham settling by 'the great trees of Mamre'. The original Hebrew tradition appears, to judge from a textual variation conserved in the Septuagint, to have referred to a single great oak tree, which Josephus called Ogyges. Mamre may have been an Amorite, a tribal chieftain after whom a grove of trees was named. Genesis connected it with Hebron or a place nearby that city. Mamre has frequently been associated with the Cave of the Patriarchs. According to one scholar, there is considerable confusion in the Biblical narrative concerning not only Mamre, but also Machpelah, Hebron and Kiryat Arba, all four of which are aligned repeatedly. In Genesis, Mamre is also identified with Hebron itself (). The Christian tradition of identifying a ruined site surrounded by walls and called in Arabic Rāmet el-Ḥalīl ('Hill of the Friend', meaning: "the friend of God", i.e. Abraham), with the Old Testament Mamre, goes back to the earliest Christian pilgrims in the 4th century CE, and connects to a tradition from the time of Herod (1st century BCE).
Elsewhere () it is called 'the Terebinths of Mamre the Amorite', Mamre being the name of one of the three Amorite chiefs who joined forces with those of Abraham in pursuit of Chedorlaomer to save Lot (Gen. 14:13,24).
The supposed discrepancy is often explained as reflecting the discordance between the different scribal traditions behind the composition of the Pentateuch, the former relating to the Yahwist, the latter to the Elohist recension, according to the documentary hypothesis of modern scholarship.
Identification
There appear to be three main sites which have been known, at different times in history, as Mamre. These are, chronologically: Khirbet Nimra, an archaeological site next to Hebron and 2,5 km north of Ramat el-Khalil, identified as the Persian- and Hellenistic-period Mamre. Ramat el-Khalil, also spelled Ramet el-Khulil, is the site identified as Mamre in the time of King Herod (1st century BCE), Constantine the Great (4th century CE), and possibly the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (12th-13th centuries CE). Talmudic sources refer to the site as Beth Ilanim or Botnah. The ruins of the Herodian and Constantinian structure became also known in Arabic as Beit el-Khalil, meaning "Abraham's House". Khirbet es-Sibte (also Ain Sebta), the present-day site of the so-called Oak of Mamre, 2 km southwest of Ramat el-Khalil, has been considered since the 19th century by Christians to be the place where Abraham saw the angels. A modern Russian Orthodox monastery is marking the site.
History and archaeology
Khirbet Nimra: Persian and Hellenistic Mamre
According to Jericke among others, Persian and Hellenistic Mamre was located at Khirbet Nimra, 1 km north of modern Hebron, where a pagan tree cult predated the composition of the biblical Abraham narrative.