Genesis 50:10 names this as the place where Ya'akov (Jacob) was mourned for seven days by Yoseph and his brothers, though actually they had already performed forty days of mourning, and the Egyptians seventy, before they set out with his embalmed corpse. The local people, witnessing the intensity of the seven-day period (the term shiva, which means seven - שבע - derives from this), gave it the name Avel Mitsrayim (אבל מצרים), properly translated as "the meadow of the Egyptians", though the word "ovel" is also still part of Jewish mourning, with Avalut (אבלות) - "Aveilus" in the strongly Yiddish link - being the word for the act of mourning.
There is much debate among the Biblical scholars as to whether Ya'akov was merely mourned, or also buried, at Goren Ha Atad, though verse 13 states very clearly that "his sons carried him into the land of Kena'an, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, the field which Av-Raham bought, in order to possess a burying place, from Ephron the Chiti, in front of Mamre."
The argument, on one side, is: how odd to sit shiva in one place, but bury in another. But actually no one sits shiva in a cemetery, and a Goren was a threshing-floor, always a place of holiness because the corn depended on the corn-god - and Yoseph's story, once he becomes Vizier of Egypt, is all about the corn.
The argument, on a second side, is: embalming a corpse is not a Yisra-Eli custom, and is in fact prohibited; it is highly implausible that an embalmed body would have been buried in the holiest of all cemeteries, Machpelah. But, maybe, on this occasion, they did.
The argument, on a third side, is: clearly he was buried at Goren Ha Atad, but the Redactor needed to have all the patriarchs buried in the same place, so he was textually moved there; they would have moved Rachel too, but her tomb at Tseltsach (usually pronounced Zelzah in English - see 1 Samuel 10:2) was still an important fertility in shrine, so she has stayed put until this very day.
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