Genesis eighteen places Abraham at Mamre, sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, when he looks up and sees three men standing before him. He runs to greet them, offers water and rest, and has a meal prepared, and only as the visit unfolds does the text make clear that this is no ordinary encounter: one of the three speaks with what the text presents as divine authority, promising that Sarah, long past the age of childbearing, will have a son within the year. Sarah, listening from the tent, laughs at the promise, and the visitor's response, asking whether anything is too difficult for the divine to accomplish, is one of the more quoted lines of the whole patriarchal narrative. Jewish tradition since antiquity has generally read the three visitors as God accompanied by two attending angels, a reading also carried into later Christian iconography, where the scene became a standard subject depicting hospitality extended to the divine unaware.
The physical site attached to this narrative was substantial enough by the first century BCE that Herod the Great built a massive rectangular enclosure around it, roughly forty-nine by sixty-five meters, using the same large drafted-margin masonry style he used at the Temple Mount enclosure in Jerusalem. Portions of that wall still stand today, giving Mamre one of the relatively few Herodian structures outside Jerusalem itself to survive largely intact, physical evidence that whatever earlier tradition already marked the spot, it was significant enough by Herod's reign to warrant monumental building on the same scale he reserved for his most important religious commissions.