The Altar Jacob Promised at Beit El and Did Not Build

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The Son His Parents Called Great

Isaac had gone blind, and he sent for his elder son to come in and take the blessing before he died. He did not say Esau. He said, my great son.

An hour later Rebekah pulled a bundle down off a shelf at the back of the house. The clothes of Esau, her great son. Two parents, the same word, the same afternoon, about the same man.

Heaven used a different word. If he is great in your eyes, he is small in mine.

There was a province once that drew up a list of fighting men for the king's army. One woman there had a small slack son whom she went around calling Tall and Quick, and when the recruiting officers came down her street she stood in the road and demanded to know why the boy was not on the list. Look at him, she said. Tall and Quick. They looked at him. "To you he is tall and quick," they said. "To us he is the puniest of the puny."

Jacob took the blessing that afternoon, and by nightfall he was running for his life.

The Stone He Put Under His Head

He went north with nothing. The sun went down on him in open country, so he took a stone off the ground for a pillow and slept there, and in the night a ladder stood on the earth with its top in the sky and messengers went up and down it, and a voice gave him the ground he was lying on.

He woke up frightened. He stood the stone upright, poured oil over the top of it, called the place Beit El, the house of God, and then said the rest of it out loud.

If God stays with me on this road and gives me bread to eat and a coat to wear, and brings me back to my father's house in one piece, then this stone I have set up will be a house of God, and out of everything he gives me I will hand back a tenth.

He said it to an empty field with a rock standing in it. Then he walked on to Haran and did not come back for twenty years.

He Stopped One City Short

He came back rich, with four women's children and flocks strung out for a mile along the road, and he came back terrified, because his brother was riding toward him with four hundred men.

He sent gifts ahead in waves. He split the camp in two so that half might survive. He spent the last night alone at a ford, wrestling somebody he could not throw, and came out of the water at dawn with his hip out of joint. Then the meeting went well. Esau wept on his neck and rode home to Seir.

So Jacob crossed to Shechem, bought a field outside the city from the sons of Hamor for a hundred pieces of silver, pitched his tents on it, put up an altar and named it for the God of Israel.

It was a good altar. It was not the one he had promised, and Beit El was another few days up the road. He stayed where he was.

The Daughter Who Went Out

Years earlier, on a track outside Haran, Leah had gone out to meet Jacob coming in from the field and told him he was hers that night, that she had bought him with her son's mandrakes. She went out, and she took what she went out for.

Her daughter Dinah went out as well. She went out from the tents to look at the daughters of the land, the local girls, whatever there was to see in a city her father had bought ground beside and never once entered.

Shechem son of Hamor, who ran that country, saw her, took her, kept her in his house, and then sent his father over to Jacob to arrange the wedding.

Jacob heard and said nothing until his sons came in from the fields. Simeon and Levi did the answering. On the third day, when every man in that city was lying at home too sore from the circumcision to stand up, the two of them walked in with swords, killed all of them, and carried their sister out.

What Jacob said to his sons afterward was about himself. "You have made me stink to the people living in this country. We are a small number. They will gather against me and kill me, and my house with me."

The Debt Called In

The voice arrived then, and it was not a new instruction.

Get up. Go up to Beit El. Live there. Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you were running from your brother.

Every word of it he had already said himself, out loud, over a rock, twenty years before.

He moved fast this time. He made the whole household hand over the foreign gods they had been carrying and the rings out of their ears, and he buried the pile under the oak at Shechem and left it in the dirt. Then he went up.

The road took payment. Deborah, who had nursed his mother, died on the way and was buried under an oak below Beit El, and they named the tree the Oak of Weeping. Then Rachel went into labor on the road to Ephrath and did not live through it, and he buried her at the side of the road and set a stone over her.

At Beit El he stood a pillar up, poured a drink offering on it, and poured oil over it. The same act, the same oil, the same ground. The first time it had cost him one night and a stone he found lying there.