Bethel

Bethel is Beth-El, the house of God, from bayith, house, and El, God. Jacob gave it that name after the night of the ladder, and Genesis says the city had been called Luz before that. Luz means almond or almond tree. The two names run side by side for centuries, and the writers of Joshua and Judges still stop to explain the change a whole era later.

The Hebrew word is sullam, and it occurs once in the entire Old Testament, so the sense has to be read from this one sentence. What the text says is that it was set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, and that God's angels were going up and down it. Translators have rendered it ladder, staircase and ramp, and the lexicons carry more than one of those. The picture the verse gives is a way between earth and heaven, and Scripture does not describe the object any further.

Read in order, God speaks first and promises the land, the descendants, blessing on all the families of the earth and His own presence, with no condition attached. Jacob's vow comes after that, and what it says is that if God does what He has just promised, the LORD will be his God and a tenth will follow. It is the first vow recorded in Scripture. Whether the word if is doubt or a solemn form of words has been read both ways, and the text does not settle it.

His reasoning is recorded in his own words. He feared that pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem would return his people to the house of David and cost him his life, so he built two sanctuaries at the ends of his kingdom and told the people that going up to Jerusalem was too much for them. Bethel was the southern one, closest to Judah, and it already carried four hundred years of holiness in its name, which is what made it useful. Matthew Henry and John Gill make the same point: Jeroboam did not invent a holy place, he took one.

In Joshua, Beth-aven is a real landmark of its own near Bethel and near Ai. In Hosea it is Bethel itself with its name broken on purpose: aven means emptiness or wickedness, so the house of God becomes the house of wickedness. The calf that Hosea says Samaria will mourn for is the calf of Beth-aven, which is Jeroboam's calf at Bethel. The prophet is turning a name that already existed on the map into a weapon against the sanctuary beside it.

Elisha was walking up the road to Bethel when a group came out of the city jeering “Go up, you baldhead!”, and he turned and called down a curse in the name of the LORD, and two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them. The Hebrew word the Berean Standard Bible renders boys is the same word used elsewhere of grown young men, which is why John Wesley translates it young men and says they were old enough to know good from evil. Albert Barnes points at where it happened: Bethel was the older seat of the calf worship, and the jeer came days after Elijah went up, in the town most invested in denying that the God of Elijah mattered. The text does not say the forty-two died, and it does not say how large the group was.

An unnamed man of God from Judah cried out against Jeroboam's altar and said a son named Josiah would be born to the house of David and would burn human bones on it. When Josiah did it, the writer of Kings says the act was done according to the word of the LORD proclaimed by the man of God who had foretold these things, and Josiah then asked whose tomb stood there and ordered the man's bones left undisturbed. Commentators differ on the interval: Adam Clarke reckons three hundred and forty years, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown reckon three hundred and twenty-six. The two chapters are tied together by the biblical writer himself and not only by later readers.

This is reception history, named and dated, and it is not this site's own reading. Jubilees, a Second Temple work probably from the second century BC, has Levi receive his priesthood in a vision at Bethel and states that Bethel is not the place chosen for the temple. Genesis Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on Genesis compiled around the fifth century AD, reads the angels in more than one way at 68:12 and 68:13, including angels of the land handing Jacob over to angels outside it, and the rising and falling of the empires that would rule over Israel. A tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud at Hullin 91b and in the Targum has the angels ascending to look at the image of Jacob engraved above. Later Jewish commentators often move the vision itself to Mount Moriah.

The standard identification is the village of Beitin on the central ridge about 17 kilometres north of Jerusalem, proposed by Edward Robinson in 1838 on the strength of the Arabic name and the site's position beside Ai and the ridge road. W. F. Albright dug there in 1934 and J. L. Kelso directed further seasons in 1954, 1957 and 1960, publishing the final report in 1968; they found a Middle Bronze walled town, a burned Late Bronze town and Iron Age occupation through the monarchy. David Livingston argued in 1970 that Bethel is el-Bireh instead, reading the twelfth milestone of the Onomasticon of Eusebius and Jerome against Beitin, and Anson Rainey answered him in the same journal in 1971. No sanctuary of Jeroboam has been recovered at either site, and the date of the Late Bronze destruction has been argued over since Albright proposed it.