Was Jacob buried at Machpelah or at Shechem?

Stephen does not say that Jacob was buried at Shechem. Verse 15 says that Jacob died in Egypt, and so did “our fathers”, his twelve sons. Verse 16 says that ‘they’ were carried to Shechem, and Stephen’s hearers knew who was meant. Jacob’s burial at Machpelah was one of the best-known scenes in Genesis (49:29–32; 50:13), and the burial of Joseph’s bones at Shechem, when Israel entered the land, was just as famous (Joshua 24:32; compare Genesis 50:25). The BSB brings this out: “Their bones were carried back to Shechem”. John Gill and Albert Barnes both read the verse this way: Jacob was laid at Machpelah, the patriarchs at Shechem.

Stephen was speaking to men who knew Genesis well, and he gathers the deaths and burials of two generations into one sentence. His point was the one he had made in verse 5: in the land God had promised them, the fathers owned nothing but graves, and those they had to buy. The same compression accounts for Stephen’s words about who bought the tomb, which is a separate question on this site.

The Syriac reading

The old Syriac version puts the verb in the singular, ‘he was carried’, as though Stephen spoke of Jacob alone. Gill notes this but sets it aside: the Greek is plural, and Jacob was buried at Machpelah, so the verse must speak of the fathers.

Two burials in one sentence

Some read the whole of verses 15–16 as covering both burials at once: Jacob carried to the tomb Abraham bought at Machpelah, his sons to the ground at Shechem bought from the sons of Hamor. John Gill thought this the best reading, and on it too Stephen places Jacob at Machpelah.

Scripture says only that Joseph was buried at Shechem. Whether his brothers were laid there too is not recorded. Josephus says they were buried at Hebron, while other Jewish writers placed them at Shechem, and Stephen’s words follow the second view. Barnes suggests that the Samaritans’ hold on Shechem may have led some Jews to prefer the Hebron tradition.