Genesis 23:4 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

I am a stranger, &c.— There is something affecting in the venerable patriarch's declaration and request: a stranger in the land of promise, and inheriting no part of it, he requests the possession of a burying-place only for his beloved wife, himself, and family. The Orientals, as Le Clerc observes, seem to have had the same notion about burying-places, which afterwards prevailed among the Greeks and Romans, namely, that it was ignominious to be buried in another's ground; and therefore every family, the poorer sort excepted, had a sepulchre of their own, nor would suffer others to be interred with them. One cannot fail to remark, that interring seems to have been the most ancient, as well as the most natural way of disposing of the dead. "To me," says Cicero, "that appears to have been the most ancient kind of sepulture, which Cyrus, in Xenophon, is said to have made use of. For thus the body is returned to the earth whence it was taken, and so placed and situated, is hid as it were in the womb of the common mother." De legibus, lib. ii. c. 22.