Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

But the vision was more than a mere dream. God appeared in it to the patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his fathers. Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of Abraham was to be carried on. When he awoke in the morning the fugitive recognized the real character of his dream. He took, accordingly, the stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar, poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or "House of God," Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.

The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones. They are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of the Old Testament in Northern Arabia. In Phoenicia we are told that they abounded. The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; it rose up awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a protection from the perils of the night. When his worship and adoration came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess Ashêrah. The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual dwelling-place was in heaven.

The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his dream bore the name of Luz. In Israelitish days, however, the name of the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On,—a name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt. Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known as Beitîn.

It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia. His new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of patriarchal Palestine.

When he again emerges, it is as a middle-aged man, rich in flocks and herds, who has won two wives as the reward of his labours, and is already the father of a family. He is on his way back to the country which had been promised to his seed and wherein he himself had been born. Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up to commemorate the fact. The cairn continued to bear a double name, the Aramaean name given to it by Laban, and the Canaanitish name of Galeed, "the heap of witnesses," by which it was called by Jacob. The double name was a sign of the two populations and languages which the cairn separated from one another. Northward were the Aramaeans and an Aramaic speech; southward the land of Canaan and the language which we term Hebrew.

The spot where the cairn was erected bore yet another title. It was also called Mizpah, the "watch-tower," the outpost from which the dweller in Canaan could discern the approaching bands of an enemy from the north or east. It protected the road to the Jordan, and kept watch over the eastern plateau. Here in after times Jephthah gathered around him the patriots of Israel, and delivered his people from the yoke of the Ammonites.

Once more "Jacob went on his way," and from the "two-fold camp" of Mahanaim sent messengers to his brother Esau, who had already established himself among the mountains of Seir. Then came the mysterious struggle in the silent darkness of night with one whom the patriarch believed to have been his God Himself. When day dawned, the vision departed from him, but not until his name had been changed. "Thy name," it was declared to him, "shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed." And his thigh was shrunken, so that the children of Israel in days to come abstained from eating "of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh." The spot where the struggle took place, beside the waters of the Jabbok, was named Penu-el, "the face of God." There was more than one other Penu-el in the Semitic world, and at Carthage the goddess Tanith was entitled Peni-Baal, "the face of Baal."

The name of Israel, as we may learn from its equivalent, Jeshurun, was really derived from a root which signified "to be straight," or "upright." The Israelites were in truth "the people of uprightness." It is only by one of those plays upon words, of which the Oriental is still so fond, that the name can be brought into connection with the word sar, "a prince." But the name of Jacob was well known among the northern Semites. We gather from the inscriptions of Egypt that its full form was Jacob-el. Like Jeshurun by the side of Israel, or Jephthah by the side of Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 27), Jacob is but an abbreviated Jacob-el. One of the places in Palestine conquered by the Pharaoh Thothmes III., the names of which are recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, was Jacob-el—a reminiscence, doubtless, of the Hebrew patriarch. Professor Flinders Petrie has made us acquainted with Egyptian scarabs on which is inscribed in hieroglyphic characters the name of a king, Jacob-bar or Jacob-hal, who reigned in the valley of the Nile before Abraham entered it, and Mr. Pinches has lately discovered the name of Jacob-el among the persons mentioned in contracts of the time of the Babylonian sovereign Sin-mu-ballidh, who was a contemporary of Chedor-laomer. We thus have monumental evidence that the name of Jacob was well known in the Semitic world in the age of the Hebrew patriarchs.

Jacob and Esau met and were reconciled, and Jacob then journeyed onwards to Succoth, "the booths." The site of this village of "booths" is unknown, but it could not have been far from the banks of the Jordan and the road to Nablûs. The neighbourhood of Shechem, called in Greek times Neapolis, the Nablûs of to-day, was the next resting-place of the patriarch. If we are to follow the translation of the Authorised Version, it would have been at "Shalem, a city of Shechem," that his tents were pitched. But many eminent scholars believe that the Hebrew words should rather be rendered: "And Jacob came in peace to the city of Shechem," the reference being to his peaceable parting from his brother. There is, however, a hamlet still called Salîm, nearly three miles to the east of Nablûs, and it may be therefore that it was really at a place termed Shalem that Jacob rested on his way. In this case the field bought from Hamor, "before the city of Shechem," cannot have been where, since the days of our Lord, "Jacob's well" has been pointed out (S. John iv. 5, 6). The well is situated considerably westward of Salîm, midway, in fact, between that village and Nablûs, and close to the village of 'Askâr, with which the "Sychar" of S. John's Gospel has sometimes been identified. It has been cut through the solid rock to a depth of more than a hundred feet, and the groovings made by the ropes of the waterpots in far-off centuries are still visible at its mouth. But no water can be drawn from it now. The well is choked with the rubbish of a ruined church, built above it in the early days of Christianity, and of which all that remains is a broken arch. It has been dug at a spot where the road from Shechem to the Jordan branches off from that which runs towards the north, though Shechem itself is more than a mile distant. We should notice that S. John does not say that the well was actually in "the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph," only that it was "near to" the patriarch's field.

If Jacob came to Shechem in peace, the peace was of no long continuance. Simeon and Levi, the sons of the patriarch, avenged the insult offered by the Shechemite prince to their sister Dinah, by treacherously falling upon the city and slaying "all the males." Jacob was forced to fly, leaving behind him the altar he had erected. He made for the Canaanitish city of Luz, the Beth-el of later days, where he had seen the great altar-stairs sloping upward to heaven. The idols that had been carried from Mesopotamia were buried "under the oak which was by Shechem," along with the ear-rings of the women. The oak was one of those sacred trees which abounded in the Semitic world, like another oak at Beth-el, beneath which the nurse of Rebekah was soon afterwards to be buried.