Genesis35chapter 35

Genesis 35:1

God sends Jacob back to the place where he had vowed, twenty years earlier, that if he came again to his father's house in peace then the LORD would be his God and the stone would be God's house. By now he has been in the land seven or eight years, has bought ground at Shechem and built an altar there, and the vow made at Bethel is still unpaid. God identifies himself by the night the vow was made, as the God that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother.

Genesis 35:2-4

Rachel had stolen her father's images four chapters earlier, and the household still has foreign gods in it after Jacob has wrestled at Peniel and been given a new name. The order runs put away, be clean, change your garments, which is the preparation Israel is given at Sinai before God comes down. They hand over the gods and their earrings, and Clarke reads those earrings as charms consecrated to some god rather than ornaments. Jacob buries the lot under the oak at Shechem, and Joshua will later set up a stone under an oak in that same place.

Genesis 35:5-7

After Simeon and Levi emptied Shechem, Jacob had said he would be destroyed, he and his house, and this verse answers that exact fear without his lifting a hand. The cities with every reason to pursue do not move. He builds the altar he was told to build and names the place El-bethel, the God of the house of God, so the name now honours the person who met him there rather than the ground he met him on.

Genesis 35:8

Deborah Rebekah's nurse died: The nurse who came with Rebekah out of Padan-aram is given her name for the first time on the day she dies, since Genesis 24 says only that they sent away Rebekah and her nurse. She is buried under an oak below Bethel, and the tree is called Allon-bachuth, the oak of weeping. Genesis never reports Rebekah's own death anywhere, and a reader learns she was buried at Machpelah only from Jacob's dying instructions in chapter 49. The servant gets the mourning and a named tree, and her mistress gets one line in a burial list.

Genesis 35:9-10

The name Israel is spoken over him a second time, three chapters after the man at Jabbok first gave it. Genesis states its own rule about a thing said twice at 41:32, that it is established by God, and here the second saying settles what a wrestling match in the dark had begun. Jerome takes the first as the promise and this as its fulfilment, and Wesley takes it as God ratifying in person what the angel had said.

Genesis 35:11-12

I am God Almighty: Isaac had sent him out of the land with the words God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and God now says them to him in person. The clause kings shall come out stands in only two places in the King James Bible, here and in the covenant with Abraham in chapter 17, where a change of name and this same name of God are joined in the same order. Be fruitful and multiply is the word given to Adam and again to Noah, so the blessing spoken over the whole race is now carried by one family. The land is promised again to him and to his seed, while the only ground the family actually holds in it is a cave bought for a burial and a field bought at Shechem, which is what Hebrews means by dying in faith without receiving the promises.

Genesis 35:13-15

The same sentence closes the covenant scene with Abraham, where he left off talking with him and God went up from Abraham. Jacob answers with a pillar, as he had on the night he fled, but that first stone had only oil poured on it and this one takes a drink offering first. It is the first drink offering in Scripture, poured by a man on his way home rather than commanded at an altar of sacrifice. He then gives the place the name he had given it twenty years before, so the vow and the paying of it carry one name.

Genesis 35:16-18

Rachel had said give me children or else I die, and when God remembered her in chapter 30 she named that son Joseph and asked out loud for another. Benjamin is the son she asked for, and bearing him is what kills her. She calls him Ben-oni, son of my sorrow, and his father calls him Benjamin, son of the right hand, the one child in Genesis whose mother's name for him is overruled by his father. Jacob had his own name changed twice, and he will not let the boy carry a name made out of his mother's dying.

Genesis 35:19-20

The road she dies on runs into Bethlehem, and Micah names that town as the place the ruler of Israel comes out of. Jacob sets a pillar on the grave, the writer says it was still standing when he wrote, and Samuel is still using it as a landmark in the border of Benjamin generations later. Jeremiah hears Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, and Matthew quotes that line over the children killed at Bethlehem.

Genesis 35:21-22

Edar is the tower of the flock, and Micah addresses the tower of the flock as the strong hold of the daughter of Zion. Jerome reports that the Hebrews placed this spot where the temple was later built, and the Targum of Jonathan says the King Messiah will be revealed there, which are readings held in those traditions rather than anything the verse itself states. Reuben then lies with his father's concubine, and the whole recorded response is three words, that Israel heard it. Nothing more is said about it until chapter 49, where the firstborn is told he shall not excel because he went up to his father's bed, and Chronicles records that the birthright went instead to the sons of Joseph.

Genesis 35:23-26

The twelve are listed together for the first time, grouped by their four mothers rather than set in order of age. Reuben still carries the title Jacob's firstborn one verse after the act that costs him the birthright, so the list keeps the rank while the blessing has already gone. Judah stands fourth in a line he will end up leading, and Rachel's two are counted together though one of them was born a few verses ago. The closing line says they were born to him in Padan-aram, which is true of eleven, since Benjamin was born on the road this chapter has just described.

Genesis 35:27-29

Jacob reaches his father at Hebron, where the cave Abraham bought stands, and Genesis says nothing at all about the meeting, though the last words between these two had been a stolen blessing and a brother's threat to kill. Isaac dies at a hundred and eighty, and Esau and Jacob bury him together, exactly as Isaac and Ishmael had buried Abraham a generation before. A book that opened with one brother killing another keeps setting brothers side by side at graves. Gill works out that Isaac was alive twelve years after Joseph was sold, so his death is reported here to close the account rather than in the order it fell, and the next line opens the generations of Esau.