Return to Bethel, Birth and Bereavement

Bethel stands in the hill country well above Shechem, so “go up” is plain geography as well as worship. God speaks of himself in the third person, “unto God, that appeared unto thee”, pointing Jacob back to the vow of 28:20–22, which promised a house of God at this very spot and has waited some twenty years to be kept.

“Strange gods” is elohei hannekar, the gods of the foreigner. “All that were with him” now includes the women and children carried off from Shechem in 34:29. Washing and changing clothes before meeting God returns at Sinai, where Israel washes its garments for the third day (Exodus 19:10).

Jacob retells Bethel in his own words. In chapter 28 he never prayed; God spoke first and unasked. “Was with me in the way which I went” lifts the wording of his own conditional vow, “if God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go” (28:20), and declares its condition met.

Earrings were worn as amulets as well as ornaments, and in Exodus 32:2–4 earrings are melted into the golden calf. “Hid” means buried. The oak by Shechem is probably the tree of Moreh where Abraham built his first altar in the land (12:6), and Joshua 24:23–26 repeats the command to put away strange gods under an oak at Shechem.

In 34:30 Jacob predicted that the Canaanites would gather against him, “I being few in number”. The fear he expected to fall on his household falls on the cities instead. The Hebrew for “terror”, chittat, appears only here in the Old Testament.

Luz, meaning almond tree, is the city’s Canaanite name, noted already in 28:19. The added words “he and all the people that were with him” set this arrival against the first, when Jacob crossed the Jordan with nothing but a staff (32:10).

El-beth-el, “God of the house of God”, names the God rather than the spot. The verb “appeared” is plural in Hebrew, niglu, one of the rare places where Elohim takes a plural verb; older Jewish readers linked it to the angels on the ladder of 28:12.

Rebekah’s nurse went with her from Haran in 24:59 without a name and receives one only at her grave. Allon-bachuth means “oak of weeping”. Rebekah’s own death is never recorded, and Rashi took this weeping to cover her as well; that is an inference, since the verse mourns only Deborah.

“Again” counts back to chapter 28, when God appeared at Bethel to a man fleeing with nothing. The blessing Jacob once took from his blind father by disguise (27:27–29) is now given to him directly, with no one deceived.

At the Jabbok the name Israel came from a wrestler who would not give his own name (32:28–29). Here God speaks it plainly. Abram was never called Abram again after 17:5, but Genesis goes on calling this man Jacob in verse 14, and uses both names to the end of the book.

“God Almighty” is El Shaddai, the name God gave himself when he renamed Abram (17:1). It is also the name Isaac used in blessing Jacob as he left home (28:3), and the blessing’s wording returns here from God’s own mouth. “Be fruitful and multiply” is the charge of 1:28 and 9:1, given for the first time to a single patriarch.

“The land which I gave” is in the past tense, although Abraham owned a burial cave and Jacob a single field bought at Shechem (33:19). The gift is spoken as settled before any of it is held. Three generations are named in one sentence.

The same phrase closes God’s speech to Abraham in 17:22: “God went up from Abraham.” Within three verses the words “the place where he talked with him” occur three times, fixing the meaning of the spot before its name is given.

The first pillar at Bethel received only oil (28:18). This one receives a drink offering as well, the first nesek, or poured offering, in the Bible. Wine poured on the ground or the altar later becomes a standing part of the tabernacle sacrifices (Numbers 15:5).

Jacob named the place Bethel once already, alone, in 28:19. He names it again with a whole household standing by. The first naming marked a vision given to a fugitive; the second marks a promise renewed to a man coming home.

“A little way” translates kivrat ha’arets, an old measure of distance of uncertain length that Jacob uses of this same stretch of road when he remembers it on his deathbed (48:7). The labour is hard enough that the Hebrew word for it, qashah, is used twice in two verses.

At Joseph’s birth Rachel named him with a request, “The LORD shall add to me another son” (30:24). The midwife’s words answer it. In 1 Samuel 4:20 women say the same “Fear not; for thou hast born a son” to the wife of Phinehas as she too dies in childbirth.

Oni can mean sorrow, but the same word means strength or vigour, and Jacob calls Reuben “the beginning of my strength”, reshit oni, in 49:3. Benjamin is “son of the right hand”, the side of honour; since yamin also means south, some have read “son of the south”, the one son born in Canaan.

Rachel is buried where she falls, by the road, not in the cave at Machpelah where Jacob will ask to lie beside Leah (49:31). 1 Samuel 10:2 places Rachel’s tomb on the border of Benjamin at Zelzah, north of Jerusalem, and Jeremiah 31:15 hears her weeping in Ramah, so the site was already debated.

Jacob’s pillars now mark four things: a dream (28:18), a treaty with Laban (31:45), God’s speech (35:14) and a wife’s grave. “Unto this day” speaks from the writer’s own time, when the marker could still be pointed out.

This is the first time Genesis itself, rather than God or an angel, calls Jacob “Israel”, and it does so in the verse after Rachel’s burial. Migdal Eder means “tower of the flock”, a shepherds’ watchtower; Micah 4:8 uses the same words for Jerusalem.

Taking a father’s concubine was a claim on his place, as when Absalom goes in to David’s concubines (2 Samuel 16:21–22). Rashi reads it instead as Reuben overturning Bilhah’s bed to defend his mother Leah after Rachel’s death. The Hebrew text breaks mid-verse after “Israel heard it”; the Greek adds “and it seemed evil before him”.

Reuben is still called the firstborn in the very verse after his offence. Leah’s six are listed in birth order from chapters 29 and 30, but they were not born together: Issachar and Zebulun came after the four sons of the handmaids.

Rachel’s line is the shortest in the list, two names, and one of them was born a few verses ago. Joseph, the son Jacob loved above the others, is here only a name in a row; the next chapter will open on him.

Bilhah is named again two verses after Reuben lay with her, and still called “Rachel’s handmaid”. Both her sons were named by Rachel, not by Bilhah: Dan for judgement and Naphtali for wrestling (30:6–8).

Gad and Asher were named by Leah, “a troop cometh” and “happy am I” (30:11–13). The handmaids’ sons close the list though Dan and Naphtali were the fifth and sixth born; the order follows the rank of the mothers, not the order of the births.

Kirjath-arba, “the city of Arba”, is named after Arba, “a great man among the Anakims” (Joshua 14:15). Jacob left Isaac at Beersheba (28:10) and finds him at Hebron. No word is said of Rebekah, who sent him away “a few days” (27:44) and is never seen again.

A hundred and eighty is the longest life of the patriarchs: Abraham reached 175, Jacob 147, Joseph 110. By the ages given, Isaac was sixty at Jacob’s birth (25:26), so he would still have been living for about twelve years after Joseph was sold into Egypt.

The words follow Abraham’s death notice in 25:8 almost phrase for phrase. At Abraham’s grave the chosen son was named first, “Isaac and Ishmael” (25:9); at Isaac’s the firstborn is, “Esau and Jacob”. Where they buried him is left for 49:31: the cave of Machpelah.