Jacob Buried the Idols Under a Tree and Held the World Together

The command Jacob gave his household before the return to Beth-El was more rigorous than anything later law would require. "Remove the foreign gods that are in your midst, and purify yourselves, and change your garments" (Genesis 35:2). Rabbi Yoḥanan, one of the central figures in the Midrashic tradition of third-century Roman Palestine, drew a sharp comparison: the Mishnah, the codified law compiled around 200 CE, prohibited only vessels adorned with specific images -- a figure of the sun, a figure of the moon, or a figure of a dragon. Jacob went further. He insisted that his household change their garments entirely, disposing of any garment with any image whatsoever, because he feared that even an ordinary decorative image might have been made for the purpose of idolatry. Rabbi Yoḥanan's conclusion was categorical: all garments with images fall within the category of idols. Jacob our patriarch was more expert in the minutiae of idol worship than later generations had become.

What happened to the idols once they were surrendered? "They gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that were in their possession, and the rings that were in their ears, and Jacob interred them beneath the terebinth that is near Shechem" (Genesis 35:4). The rabbis noted the location carefully. Shechem was the city where Simeon and Levi had killed every male in revenge for Dinah. It was a place already marked by blood and controversy. The terebinth near Shechem was, in various traditions, the tree where Abraham had first received the divine promise about the land. Now it became a burial site for objects of foreign worship, hidden in the ground where they could do no further harm.

Centuries later, a rabbi named Yishmael ben Rabbi Yosei was passing through the region on his way to pray in Jerusalem. A Samaritan stopped him and asked why he was going to Jerusalem when the blessed mountain -- their mountain, Mount Gerizim -- was right there. Rabbi Yishmael's reply was pointed: you are like a dog that is eager for a carcass. The Samaritans knew that idols were interred under the mountain -- Jacob had buried them there -- and that was why they were eager for it. Jacob's act of burial had not purified the site in Samaritan eyes; it had sanctified it as a treasure to be guarded. The conversation turned dangerous. The Samaritans concluded the rabbi was trying to dig up the buried idols, and he had to flee in the night. The idols that Jacob buried were still causing trouble hundreds of years after he interred them.

But the same Jacob who buried those idols was, in the deepest reading of the midrashic tradition, not merely a patriarch who cleaned house before returning to a holy site. He was, in an almost cosmological sense, the reason the house existed at all. The text in Leviticus 26 that begins "I will remember My covenant with Jacob" opened a chain of interpretation in the rabbis that led far beyond covenant renewal. Rabbi Pinhas said in the name of Rabbi Reuven: the Holy One said to His world, "My world, My world, I will tell you who created you and who fashioned you. Jacob created you and Jacob fashioned you." The proof text came from Isaiah 43:1: "Your Creator, Jacob, and your Fashioner, Israel." The rabbis read this literally: Jacob was the one on whose account the world was made.

The tradition multiplied examples. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Rabbi Neḥemya said that heavens and earth were created only due to the merit of Jacob, reading Psalms 78:5 -- "He set a testimony in Jacob" -- and connecting it to Deuteronomy 30:19, where heaven and earth are called as witnesses. The heavens and earth that serve as witnesses in Deuteronomy exist, in this reading, because Jacob gave them something to witness. Rabbi Berekhya and Rabbi Levi offered the most daring interpretation: Abraham himself was rescued from Nimrod's furnace only because of Jacob. God looked forward through time, saw that Jacob would eventually be born from Abraham's line, and decided that Abraham was worth saving for the sake of what would come from him. Jacob's merit sustained the entire structure of creation, backward and forward in time.

How do these two images of Jacob fit together? The man who insisted on burying earrings and garments with decorative images, who was stricter about idolatry than later law required, who hid foreign gods under a tree near a contested city -- and the cosmic figure whose merit precedes creation itself? The midrashic tradition does not see a contradiction. The man who is most scrupulous about removing false worship from his household is the man who most fully grasps what the world is for. Jacob's excessive caution about garments was not obsessive punctiliousness. It was the behavior of a man who understood, at some level, that the world had been made for something specific, and that anything which compromised that purpose -- even a woven image on a sleeve -- was a kind of unraveling. He buried the idols. He buried the rings. He buried the garments. And then he went back to Beth-El, the house of God, which was the place he had been walking toward all along.