Context & Key Themes
Genesis 35 is a chapter of return, renewal, loss, and endings. God calls Jacob back to Bethel, the place where He first appeared to him as a fugitive. Jacob puts away the foreign gods from his household, purifies his people, and goes up to Bethel to build the altar he promised twenty years before. God appears to him again, confirms the name Israel, and reaffirms the covenant. Then the chapter moves through grief: Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin. Reuben commits a grave sin against his father. Isaac dies. A generation closes. The themes are covenant renewal, the putting away of idols, and the painful losses that mark the turning of one chapter of the story into the next.
Key Verses
“God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.’ So he called his name Israel.” — Genesis 35:10
“So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem).” — Genesis 35:19
Summary
God tells Jacob to arise and go to Bethel and dwell there, and to make an altar to the God who appeared to him when he fled from Esau. Jacob calls his household together and instructs them to put away the foreign gods among them, to purify themselves, and to change their garments. They give him all the foreign gods and the rings from their ears, and Jacob buries them under the oak at Shechem. Then they set out, and a terror from God falls on the cities around them so that no one pursues them.
Jacob comes to Luz, which is Bethel, in Canaan, with all the people who are with him, and builds an altar there. He calls the place El-Bethel — God of the house of God — because there God revealed Himself to him when he fled from his brother. Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, dies and is buried below Bethel.
God appears to Jacob again and blesses him. He confirms the name Israel. He declares the covenant: I am God Almighty, be fruitful and multiply, a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body. The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and to your offspring after you. God goes up from him. Jacob sets up a pillar of stone and pours oil on it, and calls the place Bethel.
They journey on from Bethel. When they are still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel goes into hard labor. The midwife tells her not to fear, for she has another son. As her soul is departing she calls the child Ben-oni — son of my sorrow. His father calls him Benjamin — son of my right hand. Rachel dies and is buried on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. Jacob sets up a pillar over her tomb.
Israel journeys on and pitches his tent beyond the tower of Eder. While Israel dwells in that land, Reuben goes and lies with Bilhah, his father’s concubine. Israel hears of it. The twelve sons of Jacob are then listed by name.
Jacob comes to his father Isaac at Mamre, at Kiriath-arba, which is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned. Isaac lives 180 years, then breathes his last and dies, old and full of days. His sons Esau and Jacob bury him.
Reflection
The burying of the foreign gods at Shechem is a moment of genuine household consecration. These are not objects Jacob brought — they came from Laban’s house in Rachel’s saddlebag, and from the plunder of Shechem, and from wherever else the accumulated compromises of twenty years in Haran had lodged themselves in the camp. Jacob does not argue about them or negotiate. He says: put them away. And they do. The earrings go too — jewelry with religious associations in the ancient world. The whole household strips back to what it was supposed to be before it acquired all the residue of foreign devotion.
God’s appearance at Bethel closes a loop that opened in chapter 28. Jacob made a vow there — if You are with me and bring me back safely, then You will be my God and this stone will be Your house. God has been with him. He has been brought back. Now he builds the altar and God appears again and speaks the covenant in full. The vow is fulfilled. The covenant is confirmed. The wanderer has come home.
Rachel’s death is devastating in its brevity. The woman Jacob loved enough to work fourteen years for, the one whose barrenness drove the entire competition between the wives, dies giving him the twelfth son who will complete the tribe. The midwife’s words — do not fear, for you have another son — are comfort and loss in the same breath. Rachel names him with her dying breath: son of my sorrow. Jacob changes it: son of my right hand. He cannot let even her last word be only grief. He buries her on the road, not in the cave at Machpelah where the patriarchs rest. A pillar marks the place. The road to Bethlehem.
Reuben’s sin against Bilhah is recorded without comment and without consequence in the moment — but it is not forgotten. Jacob says nothing here. He will say something on his deathbed, and it will cost Reuben his birthright.