Genesis/Bereshith 35 – "Esav and Yaakov his sons buried him."

[This is another ‘revisit” of a Genesis chapter posted in 2012.  We’ve added to the Sinaite perspective the commentaries from our three sources: unbracketed commentary is from Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz; other two are indicated by the initials RA/Robert Alter, and EF/Everett Fox whose translation The Five Books of Moses we’ve chosen for this website.—Admin1.]

 

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 “El” means “god”, any god.  Anytime we see the last 2 letters “el” as a suffix in any name, that is usually a phrase in Hebrew with “god” in it, not simply a name.  Samples:

•  Jo-el,  Hebrew name יוֹאֵל (Yo’el) meaning “YAHWEH is God”)
• Micha-el, Hebrew name מִיכָאֵל (Mikha’el) meaning “who is like God?”. 
•  Samu-el, Hebrew name שְׁמוּאֵל (Shemu’el) which could mean either “name of God” or “God has heard”.
• Ishma-el Hebrew name יִשְׁמָעֵאל (Yishma’el) meaning “God will hear”. 
• Isra-el Hebrew name יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisra’el) meaning “God contended.”

 

This place formerly known as Luz is renamed “Beth-el” and becomes significant to Jacob because—

• this is where he has a dream about the ladder,
• this is where he wrestles with an “other”
• and where he receives his new name Isra-el;
• the place is called “Beth-el” or “House of El” or “house of God;”  
• “house” in the sense of God’s Presence there at some point or many points in the patriarchs lives, a place of encounter with the same God for three generations of Israel’s patriarchs;
• Jacob keeps memorializing the place with an “altar;”
• Geographical location and trivia, according to this link:

 http://www.bible-history.com/geography/ancient-israel/bethel.html:  

• Bethel (Luz, Beth-aven): Benin. Bethel “house of God” was a town about 10 miles N of Jerusalem, originally Luz (Gen 28:19).
• It was here that Abraham encamped (12:8; 13:3) in this beautiful pastureland.
•  It received the name of Bethel, “house of God,” because of Jacob’s dream (28:10-22). 
• Bethel was assigned to the Benjamites, but they did not possess it, and we find it taken by the children of Joseph (Judg 1:22-26). 
• Apparently the Ark of the Covenant was brought here (Judg 20:26-28). 
• It was one of the three places that Samuel chose in which to settle legal matters (1 Sam 7:16), 
• and Jeroboam chose Bethel as one of the two places in which he set up golden calves (1 Kings 12:28-33). 
• King Josiah removed all traces of idolatry and restored the true worship of Jehovah (2 Kings 23:15-20). 
• Bethel was occupied by Jews returning from Babylon (Ezra 2:28 with Neh 11:31).
• Around 1235 BC the city was destroyed in a great fire that left debris five feet thick in places. It is believed to be attributed to the Israelite conquest of Judges 1:22-25.
• The later Israelite level of occupation has construction strikingly inferior to Canaanite levels, but the period of David and Solomon shows noticeable recovery. No sanctuary dating to the days when Jeroboam I instituted calf worship there has yet been recovered.
• Although Bethel was only a small village during Nehemiah’s day (5th cent BC), it became an important place during the Hellenistic period and grew even larger in Roman and Byzantine days.
• Remains in the area show that the city continued to exist throughout the Byzantine era but apparently disappeared when the Muslims took over Palestine. 
• Bethel is identified with the modern Benin or Beitin. It stands upon the point of a low rocky ridge, between two shallow wadis which unite, the water then falls into the Wadi Suweinit toward the SE. Archaeologists have determined that although there was a village at Beitin as early as 3200 BC, continuous occupation of the site apparently began around BC During the sixteenth century the settlement was enlarged and surrounded with an 11 foot thick stone wall and possessed some of the best-laid masonry of that period yet discovered in Palestine. 

 

Gen. 12:8; 28:19; Josh. 18:13; Judg. 1:22ff.; 1 Sam. 7:16; 1 Kgs. 12:29; Amos 3:14; 2 Kgs. 23:15; its people, Ezra 2:28; Neh. 7:32.

 

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Abraham was called out of the idolatrous culture of Ur and Haran.  He passes on not just  monotheism or faith in one god, what he passes on is faith in the God Who has made Himself known to him, his son Isaac and to Jacob.

All three patriarchs experience this God Who Speaks to them of wondrous promises, none of which they live long enough to see, experience, or enjoy.  

Other people recognize the patriarchs’ connection to their God, but obviously, these people have not been influenced to abandon their idolatry.  Certainly not Laban, not even his daughter Rachel who smuggled out her father Laban’s idols in the previous account; and evidently the household of Jacob had to be told to get rid of their “foreign gods.”  Being told by the tribal head to do that does not translate to believing his God.

 

 

As we will understand in later narratives, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are perceived as merely one of many gods in the cultures they live in.  As such, what usually convinces people is demonstration of power or powerlessness of the gods they believe in.  

 

We hear people of faith today testify “God told me” or “God spoke to me”; how seriously do we accept their claim?  It must have been the same in the days of the patriarchs, except that YHWH their God often did something to demonstrate that He was indeed more powerful than the non-gods of the others.  

 

In this chapter, the “El” of Jacob was perceived to be backing him up. Vs. 9 repeats the promise to this third patriarch.  

 

The message is important enough for each patriarch in each generation to hear for himself directly from God rather than have the message simply transmitted from father to son; that way, each patriarch had a personal encounter with the True God, in fact through repeated encounters, not just once.

 

The 11 sons from 4 women are named.  Benjamin the youngest is the only son born in the ‘promised’ land, a second son born of Jacob’s beloved Rachel, a difficult birth which leads to her death.

 

 

Please start noticing how the biblical narrative describes death, particularly the repetition of the idea “being gathered to his people” which is described of Isaac who dies at age 180.  (Would that we be gathered to our people as well, if the phrase is any indication of life beyond the grave.) 

 

Just as the brothers Ishmael and Isaac were present at Abraham’s burial, so were the brothers Esau and Jacob at Isaac’s, significant reconciliations and final tributes of sons to their fathers. It is heartening to know that those who were not in the promised line—Ishmael and Esau—nevertheless stood with their brothers in mourning and paying respects to their father and if that was so as Scripture testifies to, they must have continued their fraternal relationship at least during their lifetime.

 

NSB@S6K, for Sinai 6000

 

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[Commentary by RA/Robert Alter and EF/Everett Fox whose translation The Five Books of Moses, is what we use in this website.—Admin.]

 

[RA]  After Jacob’s disastrous inaction in response to his daughter’s rape in the face of his vengeful sons, the narrative unit demarcated by this chapter is a collection of miscellaneous notices about Jacob and his household:

•  the consecration of the altar at Bethel;
• the death of Rebekah’s nurse;
• a reiteration of Jacob’s name change coupled with a repetition of the covenantal promise delivered to his father and grandfather;
• Rachel’s death in childbirth;
• Reubens’ cohabitation with his father’s concubine’ the death of Isaac.  

This miscellaneous overview of Jacob’s later career—just before his sons preempt the narrative foreground—bears the earmarks of a literary source different from that of the immediately preceding material.  Nevertheless, thematic reverberations from the pivotal catastrophe at Shechem sound through it.

DEATH OF ISAAC

 

Genesis/Bereshith 35

THE RETURN TO BETH-EL

1 Now God said to Yaakov:

Arise,

go up to Bet-el and stay there, and construct a slaughter-site there

to the God/El who was seen by you when you fled from Esav your brother.

 go up to Beth-el. Shechem is situated 1,880 ft. above sea-level, and Beth-el 2,890 ft.  From the former place to the latter is a continuous ascent.

an altar. Alluding to the Patriarch’s vow in XXVIII,22.

[RA] Who appeared to you when you fled from Esau your brother.  This clause, which takes us back to the dream-vision revelation and promise vouchsafed the young Jacob in chapter 28, signals this injunction to build an altar as a ritual completion of that early promise. (See comment on verse 3.)

2 Yaakov said to his household and to all who were with him:

Put away the foreign gods that are in your midst!

Purify yourselves! Change your garments! 

the strange gods.  i.e. god worshipped by foreign tribes.  According to Rashi, the reference is to the images which were included in the spoil of Shechem.

purify yourselves.  By bathing, and astaining from any act that would render them ceremonially unclean; cf. Exod. XIX, 10 ff.

[EF]  Change your garments: Speiser translates this as “Put on new clothes.”

[RA] the alien gods. Although many interpreters associate these icons or figurines with the booty taken from Shechem, Rachel’s attachment to her father’s household gods suggests that others in this large retinue of emigrating relatives and slaves may have brought cultic figurines with them from Mesopotamia.

cleanse yourselves. Nahum Sarna aptly notes, “chapter 34 is dominated by the theme of defilement; this chapter opens with the subject of purification.”

3 Let us arise and go up to Bet-el,

there I will construct a slaughter-site

to the God who answered me on the day of my distress

—he was with me on the way that I went! 

[RA] to the God Who answered me on the day of my distress and was with me.  When Jacob approximately echoes God’s words to him in verse 1, he replaces God’s revelation with God’s answering him in his trouble and being with him, thus confirming that God has truly responded to the terms he stipulated in 28:20, “if the LORD God be with me and guard me on this way that I am going.”

4 So they gave Yaakov all the foreign gods that were in their hand, along with the sacred-rings that were in their ears,

and Yaakov concealed them under the oak/ela that is near Shekhem.

 rings.  In their ears. They were more than ornaments; they were also amulets and charms (Targum Jonathan).

[RA] the rings . . . in their ears.  As archeology has abundantly discovered, earrings were often fashioned as figurines of gods and goddesses.

buried. The verb taman is generally used for placing treasure in a hidden or safe place, and is quite distinct from the term for burial that appears in verses 8, 19, and 29, which is a verb reserved for burying bodies.

5 Then they moved on.

Now a dread from God lay upon the towns that were around them,

so that they did not pursue Yaakov’s sons.

a terror of God.  A fear inspired by God.

[RA] the terror of God. Perhaps, in the view of this writer, which is more insistently theological than that of the immediately preceding narrative, the phrase means literally that God casts fear on the Canaanites in order to protect Jacob and his clan.  But the phrase is deliberately ambiguous: it could also be construed as meaning “an awesome terror,” with ‘elohim serving as an intensifier rather than referring to divinity.  In that case, the shambles to which Simeon and Levi reduced Shechem might be sufficient reason for the terror.

6 So Yaakov came back to Luz, which is in the land of Canaan-that is now Bet-el-he and all the people that were with him.

7 There he built a slaughter-site

and called the place:

Godhead/El of Bet-el!

For there had the Power-of-god been revealed to him, when he fled from his brother. 

El-beth-el. Rashi explains, ‘God who manifested Himself in Beth-el.’

8 Now Devora, Rivka’s nurse, died.

She was buried below Bet-el, beneath the oak; they called

its name: Allon Bakhut/Oak of Weeping.

Deborah Rebekah’s nurse died.  Cf. XXIV,59. She had accompanied Jacob all this while.

[EF]  Rivka’s nurse, died: See note to 24:59.

[RA] Allon-Bacuth. The name means “oak of weeping.”  Beyond the narrative etiology of a place-name, there is not enough evidence to explain what this lonely obituary notice is doing here.

9 God was seen by Yaakov again, when he came back from the country of Aram,

and he gave him blessing:

 

again.  As God had appeared to him on the outward journey, He once more manifested Himself on the return journey, to renew the promises.

Paddan-aram. iSee on XXV,20.

[EF] God was seen . . .: Apparently a different version of the Peniel story of Chap. 32.

[RA] and God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Paddan-Aram. The adverb “again,” as Rashi notes, alludes to God’s appearance to Jacob at this same place, Bethel, when he fled to Paddan-Aram.  This second version of the conferring of the name of Israel on Jacob is thus set in the perspective of a large overview of his career of flight and return, with both his eastward and westward trajectory marked by divine revelation and promise at the same spot.  The first story of Jacob’s name change is folkloric and mysterious, and the new name is given him as a token of his past victories in his sundry struggles with human and divine creatures.  Here, the report of the name change is distinctly theological, God’s words invoking both the first creation (“be fruitful and multiply”) and His promsie to Abraham (“kings shall come forth from your loins”).  In this instance, moreover, the new name is a sign of Jacob’s glorious triumphs he has already achieved, and the crucial element of struggle is not intimated.  As elsewhere in biblical narrative, the sequencing of different versions of the same event proposes different, perhaps complementary views of the same elusive subject—here, the central and enigmatic fact of the origins of the theophoric name of the Hebrew nation.

10 God said to him:

Yaakov is your name,

Yaakov shall your name be called no more,

for your name shall be Yisrael!

And he called his name: Yisrael!

God confirms the change of name made by the Angel in the heat of the contest (XXXII,29).

11 God said further to him:

I am God Shaddai. Bear fruit and be many!

Nation, yes, a host of nations shall come from you,

kings shall go out from your loins! 

God Almighty. Heb. ‘El Shaddai’.  For the promise which follows, cf. Isaac’s blessing to Jacob in XXVIII,22.

12 The land

that I gave to Avraham and to Yitzhak,

to you I give it, and to your seed after you I give the land. 

[EF] I am God Shaddai …: See God’s words to Avraham in 17:6.

13 God went up from beside him, at the place where he had spoken with him.

and God went up from him.  The same phrase in XVII,22.

[EF] At the place where he had spoken with him: The phrase occurs three times here and subsequently, probably to emphasize the sanctity of Bet-El.

14 And Yaakov set up a standing-pillar at the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone,

he poured out a poured-offering on it and cast oil upon it.

 poured oil thereon. Cf. on XXVIII,18.

[RA] and Jacob set up a pillar. The cultic or commemorative pillar, matsevah, figures equally in the first episode at Bethel, in chapter 28.  There, too, Jacob consecrates the pillar by pouring oil over it, but here, in keeping with the more pervasively ritualistic character of the story, he also offers a libation, and he builds an altar before setting up the pillar.

in the place where He had spoken with him. This phrase occurs three times in close sequence.  The underlining of “place” recalls the emphasis on that key term in the earlier Bethel episode, where an anonymous “place” was transformed into a “house of God.”  In the present instance, “place” is strongly linked through reiteration with the fact of God’s having spoken to Jacob: before the place is consecrated by human ritual acts, it is consecrated by divine speech. 

15 And Yaakov called the name of the place where God had spoken with him:

Bet-el/House of God!

16 They departed from Bet-el.

But when there was still a stretch of land to come to Efrat,

Rahel began to give birth, and she had a very hard birthing.

some way to come. i.e. a distance of no great length.

Ephrath. A place south of Beth-el.

[RA] some distance. The Hebrew, kirvat ha’arets, occurs only three times in the Bible, and there has been debate over what precisely it indicates. Abraham ibn Ezra, with his extraordinary philological prescience, suggested that the initial ki was the prefix of comparison (kaf hadimyon) and that the noun barat was “the royal measure of distance.”  In fact, modern Semitic philologists have discovered an Akkadian cognate, beru, which is the ancient mile, the equivalent of about four and a half English miles.

17 It was, when her birthing was at its hardest,

that the midwife said to her:

Do not be afraid,

for this one too is a son for you!

also is a son. ‘So the nurse cheers the dying woman by recalling her to prayer at the birth of Joseph, XXX,24’ (Skinner).

[EF] this one too is a son: This seems to be a breach birth, since the midwife already knew that it was a son when “her birthing was at its hardest”—that is, before the child had fully emerged.

[RA] for this one, too, is a son for you. Rachel, in ehr naming-speech for Joseph, had prayed for a second son, just as in her earlier imperious demand to her husband, she had asked him to give her sons, not a son.  The fulfillment of her uncompromising wish entails her death.

18  It was, as her life was slipping away

—for she was dying—

that she called his name Benyoni/Son-of-my-woe.

But his father called him: Binyamin/Son-of-the-right-hand.

Benjamin. The correct translation is, ‘the son of my old age’ (Hoffmann).  

[EF] her life was slipping away: Or, “her life-breath was leaving (her), paralleling a similar expression in Ugaritic.

But his father called him: Binhamin: Given the power of names, it would not have been considered proper for a child to begin life with a name such as the one Rahel gives him. Binyamin: Traditional English “Benjamin.”

[RA] Ben-Oni. T

The name can be construed to mean either “son of my vigor” or, on somewhat more tenuous philological grounds, “son of my sorrow.”  Given the freedom with which biblical characters play with names and their meanings, there is no reason to exclude the possibility that Rachel is punningly invoking both meanings, though the former is more likely: in her death agony, she envisages the continuation of “vigor” after her in the son she has born (the tribe Benjamin will become famous for its martial prowess).

but his father called him Benjamin. In the reports given in biblical narrative, it is more often the mother who does the naming.  This is the sole instance of competing names assigned respectively by the mother and father.  Jacob’s choice of Bin-yamin also presents a possibility of double meaning.  The most likely construal would be “son of the right hand,” that is, favored son, the one to whom is imparted special power or “dexterity.”  But the right hand also designates the south in biblical idiom, so the name could mean “dweller in the south.”  Again, the yamin component might be, as some have propsoed, not the word for right hand but a plural of yom, day or time, yielding the sense “son of old age.”

19 So Rahel died;

she was buried along the way to Efrat-that is now Bet-lehem.

Rachel died.  Nothing is said of Jacob’s grief.  Another instance of the marvellous reserve of the Scriptural narrative.  His grief for her, on whose behalf he rendered patient service for fourteen years, is indicated by a pathetic reference in XVVIII,7.

 

[EF] Bet-Lehem: Traditional English “Bethlehem.”

20 Yaakov set up a standing-pillar over her burial-place,

that is Rahel’s burial pillar of today.

pillar.  The Heb. word is that which was in later use for ‘tombstone’. Rachel’s Tomb is one of the Jewish ‘Holy Places’ in Palestine.

21 Now Yisrael departed and spread his tent beyond Migdal-eder/Herd-tower.

Migdal-eder.  This site has not been identified.

22 And it was when Yisrael was dwelling in that land: Re’uven went and lay with Bilha,his 

father’s concubine.

And Yisrael heard— 

Reuben.  It was the practice among Eastern heirs-apparent to take possession of their father’s wives, as an assertion of their right to the succession; cf. on Lev. XVIII,8.  But whatever the reason, the memory of this repulsive incident lingered in the Patriarch’s mind; it influenced the ‘blessing’ which on his death-bed he imparted to his eldest son (XLIX,4).

and Israel heard of it. ‘Of it’ is not represented in the Hebrew.  The ancient editors of the Hebrew text, the Massoretes, indicated ‘A pause in the middle of a verse’.  This means that the subject is abruptly dropped; it being too distasteful to continue so revolting a theme.

[EF] Re’uven: The following tiny fragment concerning Re’uven’s usurping his father’s concubine, serves to presage his fall as firstborn later on.  Such an act had symbolic value in biblical society; Avshalom (Absalom) sleeps with David’s concubines as a sign of rebellion and a desire to attain the crown (II Samuel 16:21-22).

[RA] Reuben went and lay with Bilhah. The enigmatic notice of Reuben’s violation of his father’s concubine is conveyed with gnomic conciseness.  The Talmud saw in the story an intention on the part of Reuben to defile the slavegirl of his mother’s dead rival, Rachel, and so to make her sexually taboo to Jacob.  More recent commentators have observed the justice that in the biblical world cohabitation with the consort of a ruler is a way of making claim to his authority (as when the usurper Absalom cohabits with his father David’s concubines), and so Reuben would be attempting to seize in his father’s lifetime his firstborn’s right to be head of the clan.

and Israel heard. The same verb is used when the report of the rape of Dinah is brought to Jacob.  In both instances, he remains silent.  The fact that he is referred to in this episode as Israel, not Jacob, may be dictated by the context of sexual outrage, for which the idiom “a scurrilous thing in Israel,” nevalah beYisra’el, is used, as in the story of Dinah.

And the sons of Jacob were twelve. The genealogical list of the sons of Jacob, followed by the list of the sons of Ishmael in the next chapter, marks a major transition in the narrative.  When the story picks up again at the beginning of chapter 37, though old Jacob is very much alive and an important figure in the background of the narrative, it will become the story of Joseph and his brothers—a tale that in all its psychological richness and moral complexity will take up the rest of the Book of Genesis.

Now the sons of Yaakov were twelve:

Graph from ourbighappyfamilyblog.blogspot.c

23 The sons of Lea: Yaakov’s firstborn, Re’uven; Shim’on, Levi and Yehuda, Yissakhar and 

Zevulun.

24 The sons of Rahel: Yosef and Binyamin.

25 The sons of Bilha, Rahel’s maid: Dan and Naftali.

26 The sons of Zilpa, Lea’s maid: Gad and Asher. These (were) Yaakov’s sons, who were born to

him in the country of Aram.

born to him in Paddan-aram.  A generalization, disregarding the one exception, Benjamin, who was born in Canaan.

27  Yaakov came home to Yitzhak his father at Mamre, in the city of Arba-that is now Hevron, 

where Avraham and Yitzhak had sojourned.

Mamre.  see on XIII,18.

Kiriath-arba.  See on XXIII,2.  Since Rebekah is not mentioned here, we may infer that she died before Jacob’s return.

28 And the days of Yitzhak were a hundred years and eighty 

29 years,/ then Yitzhak expired. He died and was gathered to his kinspeople, old and satisfied in 

days. Esav and Yaakov his sons buried him.

expired.  As Rashi points out, the Bible does not follow the chronological order here.  It is only for the sake of convenience that his death is recorded at this point.

was gathered unto his people. See on XXV,8.

Esau and Jacob.  Similarly Isaac and Ishmael had jointly performed the last rites for Abraham (XXV,9).  Isaac is a less active character than either Abraham or Jacob.  ‘Abraham was an epoch-maker; his life, therefore, was an eventful one.  Jacob closes the Patriarchal period, and his life was both rough and eventful.  Not so Isaac.  He inherits the true belief in God; his is merely the task of loyally transmitting it.  No wonder that we hear little of him, and that he repeats some of his father’s experiences’ (Hoffmann).  ‘Isaac, a patient, meditative man, strong in affection and love, typical of the domestic virtues for which his descendants have throughout the ages been remarkable. He stands as a type of the apssive virtues, which have a strength of their own.’ (The Study Bible.)

[EF] then Yitzhak expired:See the commentary on 26:1-6.

[RA] And Isaac breathed his last.  The actual chronological place of this event is obviously considerably earlier in the narrative.  The biblical writers observe no fixed commitment to linear chronology, a phenomenon recognized by the rabbis in the dictum, “there is neither early nor late in the Torah.”

Esau and Jacob his sons buried him. At this end point, they act in unison, and despite the reversal of birthright and blessing, the firstborn is mentioned first.