Jacob Forgot the Vow He Swore at Bethel and Paid for It at Shechem

Click for full size

He Came Back Whole and Opened Stalls

Jacob crossed into the land with everything he had left home without and a great deal more. Two wives, two households, eleven sons, herds moving in front of him in waves, and not one thing missing off the list. He came whole. The Holy One had honored every clause of the bargain struck twenty years earlier at Bethel, when the man was running for his life with a stone under his head.

Jacob arrived outside Shechem, bought a field, and started opening market stalls.

Meat, oil, whatever a large camp with surplus can sell to a walled town that wants it. Good business. He had learned trade from Laban, who taught it the hard way.

He did not go back up to Bethel.

Say the Vow Back to Me

The voice came while the stalls were open.

You forgot what you vowed to Me.

Then it read his own words back to him, clause by clause, the way a creditor reads a note aloud. If God will be with me. That one meant keep me from serving other gods. And will keep me. That one meant keep me from bloodshed. On this way. That one meant keep me from the kind of ruin a house does not recover from, the thing done to a daughter. And I will tithe to You everything You give me.

I will keep you in everything you go to, the Holy One had answered him at the stone. And He had.

Now the sentence. "By your life. In the very three things you named, in those you will stumble."

It was not a threat thrown at random. It was a list, in order, and the town he had chosen to camp beside was where the whole of it was waiting.

Dinah Goes Out

Dinah went out to see the women of the country. One girl, past the tent ropes, in a town full of strangers her father was selling meat to.

Scripture calls her the daughter of Leah. Everywhere else a girl is listed by her father. Here she is listed by her mother, and the sages read that as a finger pointing back a generation, because the fault started with the mother and the daughter inherited the walking out.

Shechem son of Hamor saw her, took her, and ruined her. Then his soul clung to her, which is its own horror, and he sent his father to the tents to negotiate.

The Father With His Hand on His Mouth

Hamor came to Jacob and talked about the thing as though it were a match between two good families.

"Shechem my son, his soul longs for your daughter. Give her to him, please, for a wife."

Whoever holds his neighbor cheap, Solomon wrote, is a man missing a heart, and Hamor stood in the doorway proving it, still talking, pricing a girl his son had already broken. The second half of the same verse says the man of understanding keeps quiet, and Jacob kept quiet. He heard everything, and he put his hand over his mouth, and he waited, because his sons were out in the field with the cattle and had not come in yet.

The silence was not peace. It was a man doing arithmetic about what walks through his camp at sundown.

A Thistle Sent Word to a Cedar

The prophets kept a small vicious fable about exactly this kind of proposal. A thistle growing in Lebanon sent word to a cedar in Lebanon: give your daughter to my son for a wife. And a wild beast of the field passed by and trampled the thistle flat.

Hamor is the thistle. He is low, he is thorny, he is standing in a doorway in Canaan asking a cedar for its daughter.

Jacob is the cedar, the righteous man who grows like a cedar in Lebanon.

And the beasts of the field came in from the pasture at the end of the day. Judah, a lion's whelp. Benjamin, a wolf that tears. Naphtali, a hind let loose. Issachar, an ass with heavy bones. Their father had blessed them with animals for a reason.

Two of them, Simeon and Levi, went into the town with swords while the men there were still sore from the circumcision they had agreed to, and killed Hamor and Shechem and every male in the place, and took Dinah out of the house.

The thistle did not survive the animals it had tried to bargain with.

The Gods Go Into the Ground

Count the wreckage against the vow.

Blood in the streets of Shechem, which is the second clause. Dinah, which is the third. And when the household finally moved on, Jacob stood in front of everyone and told them to hand over the foreign gods they were carrying, all of them, the household idols and the rings out of their ears, and he buried the whole pile in the dirt under the terebinth at Shechem. That is the first clause, paid last, in a hole in the ground.

Then he went up to Bethel and built the altar he had promised, twenty years and one town too late.

The Holy One had kept every word. The stone had been honored. Nothing was missing when Jacob came home. What was missing was on his side of the page, and he did not notice it until he was standing in a field of his own dead neighbors with his daughter beside him and a bag of his family's gods waiting to be covered over.