Комментарий к Берешит 23:8

נפשכם means YOUR WILL.

IF IT BE YOUR MIND TO BURY MY DEAD FROM BEFORE ME. The intent thereof is: “I will not bury my dead in another burial ground. However if it be your desire that I bury my dead, entreat for me to Ephron who has a cave at the end of his field, which is not used as his family burial-place but as a field.” The meaning of the word milphanai, (from before me), is that if you will not do so I will entomb her in a casket. It may be that it means “my dead wife who is before me, and as an obligation I must hurry to bury her.” The reason Abraham requested, and entreat for me, is that Ephron was a rich and distinguished person, as is indicated by his saying, What is that between me and thee?²⁸Verse 15: Land worth four hundred shekels of silver — what is that between me and thee? It would therefore not be to his honor to sell his ancestral inheritance, as was the case with Naboth of Jezreel.²⁹I Kings, Chapter 28. It was for this reason that Abraham did not go to Ephron to offer him an inflated price for the field, but instead he asked of the people of the city to entreat to him [Ephron] on his behalf in an honorable way.

אם יש את נפשכם לקבור, if you want that I shall bury the dead without delay, as you have indicated when you said: במבחר קברנו קבור!" (verse 6) i.e. that I would not need to wait.

וידבר… אם יש את נפשכם. He said: "If it be your desire, etc." This may be understood similarly to what we are taught in Baba Batra 36: Members of the exilarch's household were not permitted to keep land merely as a result of having occupied it although no protest had been registered as the true owners were afraid to do so. The latter were advised to retain their documents proving their title to those lands. On the other hand, landowners were not in the habit of immediately protesting when rich people squatted on their land as they hoped the improvements made by the illegal squatters would eventually benefit them when they reclaimed their property.

וידבר...את נפשכם, the word את נפשכם means ברצונכם “your pleasure, your goodwill.” We find the word נפש used also in this sense in Psalms 27,12 אל תתנני בנפש צרי, “do not deliver me to the pleasure of my oppressors.”

ופגעו לי בעפרון, “and entreat Efron on my behalf;” if you were to ask why all this was necessary after he had been offered the choice of many grave sites by the assembled people, the reason could be that Efron was himself not a member of the Hittites, as were the townspeople, so that they could not have spoken in his name also. He had come from afar and settled in Kiryat Arba and after having dwelled there they elected him as their president.

ופגעו לי — This phrase signifies entreaty, as (Ruth 1:16) “Do not entreat (תפגעי) me”.

שמעוני, agree with me that I shall receive an inalienable burial plot.

ופגעו לי, “plead on my behalf.”

When the Hittites addressed Abraham as "a prince of G'd," claiming that not one of them would deny Abraham his own burial plot, they could have alluded to either of two scenarios. 1) They described him as a great and powerful individual who was able to impose his will on the local population. They indicated that Abraham was aware that no one would dare protest what he set out to do. Just because he was a man of such calibre the usual practice of acquiring land by occupying it and no one protesting did not apply to him. As soon as they would feel powerful enough they would feel free to remove the body Abraham had buried on that land. What they conveyed was that their approval was only due to Abraham representing superior force. 2) A second way of interpreting the Hittites' response is as follows: Inasmuch as you are "a prince of G'd," you need not fear that we look upon you as a person who throws his weight around such as in the example quoted from the Talmud. Whereas the people in the household of the exilarch were suspected of robbery, no such motive would ever be attributed to Abraham. Abraham's righteousness was beyond question. Perhaps they used the word שמענו, "listen to us," in order to underline that they considered Abraham beyond reproof. Hearing this, Abraham responded: "if you truly wish me to bury my dead, etc." please act as brokers between me and Efron. Had it not been for the latter words of Abraham we would have been forced to conclude that the Hittites' offer was something based on duress.

ופגעו לי בעפרון, that he will sell me this cave even though it is not an agreeable thing for a highly placed person to sell any portion of his land-holdings. We know this from Navot (Kings I 21,3) who had been aghast at the suggestion of selling his vineyard to the king. His precise words were: חלילה לי מתתי את נחלת אבותי לך, “far be it from me to give you any part of my ancestral heritage.”