They built a boundary out of stone. This mound is a witness, and this pillar is a witness, that I may not pass beyond this mound to thee, and that thou mayest not pass beyond this mound and this pillar to do harm (Genesis 31:52).
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan retains the strict mutuality. Two witnesses, two promises, one border. Neither Laban nor Jakob would cross in hostile direction. The stones were not just geography. They were the frozen memory of a treaty pressed into the earth.
It is the quiet end to a twenty-year tangle. No embrace. No reconciliation. Just the deliberate stacking of stones that said: here and no further. Sometimes that is the most a family feud can achieve — not love restored, but violence prevented.
The Maggid teaches: some relationships do not end in healing; they end in a well-marked border. A mound of stones can be a kind of peace, especially when the alternative was more years of mutual harm. Jakob and Laban did not become friends. They became neighbors who agreed never to cross the same pile of rocks.