Bethel and Ai

Jacob's dream

Amitai (Tai) Elon

Anchor: Genesis 28:10-22. World English Bible, public domain. Supporting passages are identified separately below.

Where we are

Bethel is a ridge road stop. The watershed of the hill country runs north from Jerusalem through Ramallah and on towards Shechem, and every traveller between the south and the north used it, because the valleys on either side drop away steeply into wadis that go nowhere useful. About sixteen kilometres north of Jerusalem, at around nine hundred metres, the road passes a village called Beitin. Since the American explorer Edward Robinson rode through in 1838 and heard the old name in the new one, Beitin has been the accepted site of Bethel.^beitin

Ai is harder. The text pairs the two places, and the largest ruin east of Beitin, a mound called et-Tell, has been the main candidate for a century. But the story of Ai that matters most, Joshua's conquest, does not fit what the diggers found there. That argument belongs below. For the anchor we only need the ridge, a night, and a stone.

Nothing at Beitin is developed for visitors. There are some Byzantine and later remains, a spring, and the ordinary life of a Palestinian village. That is the ground. Jacob did not stop here because it was holy. He stopped because the sun set.

What happened, in order

The reason Jacob is on the road is the whole of chapter 27. With his mother's help he has taken his brother's blessing from their blind father, dressed in Esau's clothes and goatskins. Esau intends to kill him once Isaac is dead. Rebekah sends him to her brother Laban in Haran, and Isaac, knowing now what has happened, blesses him again and tells him to find a wife there. That is Genesis 27:1-28:9, supporting.

The anchor opens with a man leaving Beersheba for Haran, the same journey his grandfather made in reverse. He reaches "a certain place" at sunset, takes a stone for a pillow, and sleeps. He dreams: a stairway on the earth with its top in heaven, angels going up and coming down, and Yahweh standing above it. God names himself the God of Abraham and Isaac, promises the land Jacob is lying on to him and his offspring, promises offspring like dust spreading in every direction, promises blessing to all the families of the earth through him, and then makes it personal: I am with you, I will keep you wherever you go, I will bring you back, I will not leave you until I have done it.

Jacob wakes afraid. Yahweh is in this place and I did not know it. This is the house of God, the gate of heaven. In the morning he stands the pillow-stone up as a pillar, pours oil on it, and names the place Bethel, house of God; the town was Luz. Then he makes a vow, and the vow is conditional: if God is with me and keeps me and feeds me and clothes me and brings me home, then Yahweh will be my God, this stone will be God's house, and I will give a tenth.

He goes on to Haran, and the next twenty years are chapter 29 to 31.

What they were after, and the turn

Jacob wanted to get away. He is not on a pilgrimage. He is a man who cheated his brother and has that brother's threat behind him, and the only thing he is seeking at sunset is somewhere to lie down. I want to hold that, because the church has made Bethel a place of seeking, and the text makes it a place of running.

The turn is entirely God's. Jacob does nothing to earn the dream. He has just committed the worst act of his life, and the first thing God says to him is not a rebuke but a name: I am the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. The promises given to Abraham at Shechem and repeated to Isaac are now handed to the cheat asleep on a stone. And the promise ends with the line that I think carries the whole book: I will not leave you.

Then watch Jacob's answer. He is afraid, which is right. He sets up the stone and pours oil, which is worship. And then he bargains. If. If God does all this, then he will be my God. Readers have argued for centuries whether this is faith or negotiation. I think it is Jacob. He does not know how to receive a gift without making it a deal. God has just said "I will" without a single condition, and Jacob answers with "if." God takes the deal. It is the same God who, twenty years later, will wrestle him at the Jabbok and change his name.

What strikes me most is his waking sentence. Yahweh is in this place and I did not know it. He has been in the land his whole life. He has heard the stories from his father and grandfather. And it takes a night alone, running, with his head on a rock, to find out that God was here.

The Eastern lens

A Western reader sees a ladder and a vow. An Eastern reader sees a fugitive with no household setting up a standing stone, a massebah, the kind of pillar Canaanites raised at sacred places, and anointing it. That is a public act of claiming a place, done by a man who has nothing. And the vow is not a private prayer; it is a formal pledge with terms, the sort a client makes to a patron. In an honour culture, Jacob has just lost his father's house by his own act and is walking into another man's, Laban's, where he will be the one cheated. God's promise at Bethel is the offer of a patron who will keep him when no human house will. The tenth is what a client owes.^honour

Look for him

Jesus reads this text on himself. When Nathanael is astonished that Jesus saw him under the fig tree, Jesus says he will see greater things: heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. That is John 1:51, and the words are Bethel's. Jesus is claiming to be the stairway, the place where earth and heaven meet, the house of God and the gate of heaven. I hold that as John's testimony and the church's reading. The Genesis text gives a stairway and a stone; the Gospel gives a person.

The later story of this ground

Bethel is the second most named town in the Old Testament after Jerusalem. Abram camped between Bethel and Ai and built an altar in Genesis 12:8 and returned there in 13:3. Jacob came back to Bethel in chapter 35, built an altar, buried Rebekah's nurse Deborah under an oak, and received the name Israel again. Ai fell to Joshua after the first defeat and Achan's sin in Joshua 7 and 8. The ark stood at Bethel in Judges 20. Samuel judged there, 1 Samuel 7:16. Then the fall: Jeroboam set up a golden calf at Bethel in 1 Kings 12, a man of God from Judah cried against the altar in 1 Kings 13, Elisha was mocked by boys on the road up from Jericho in 2 Kings 2, Amos was told to go home by the priest of Bethel in Amos 7, Hosea renamed it Beth Aven, house of wickedness, and Josiah finally broke the altar and burned the bones in 2 Kings 23:15-16. The house of God became the house of the calf. The whole of Israel's story can be told from this one ridge.

Where the writer stood

We do not know the hand. But this chapter has the marks of a writer explaining a sanctuary that readers knew: why it was called Bethel and not Luz, why there was a standing stone, why the tithe was paid there. That fits a writer in Israel, in the time when Bethel was a royal shrine, or a writer in Judah after its fall who wanted the old story separated from Jeroboam's calf. Either way, the writer's feet are on this ridge road, and the vantage is the sanctuary looking back at its founding night.^hayes

What is contested

Bethel's site. Beitin is the majority view and has been since Robinson. A minority, led by David Livingston, argued in the 1970s for el-Bireh, adjoining Ramallah, mostly to rescue the identification of Ai. Most archaeologists have not followed them.

Ai's site. Et-Tell was a great Early Bronze city, destroyed around 2400 BC, and had only a small village in the Iron Age. There is nothing there for Joshua's army to burn in any usual date for the conquest. Responses: the story is aetiological, explaining a ruin, which is what "Ai" means; or the conquest is later than usually thought; or Ai is elsewhere, with Khirbet el-Maqatir, a kilometre west, argued by the Associates for Biblical Research. I tell you the ruin and the debate; I do not resolve it.^ai

The stairway. The Hebrew sullam appears only here. Ladder, stairway, ramp; the image may be the stepped side of a Mesopotamian temple tower, which would be a sharp thing to put in a dream on the road to Haran. That is an interpretation, not a fact.

Standing here today

Beitin lies just off Route 60 north of Ramallah. There is no park, no sign, no ticket. Whether you can stop depends on the day; check before you go. What is always open is the road itself, the ridge, and the view east from any point along it, down through the desert wadis to the Jordan valley. Jacob went that way to Haran and came back that way twenty years later with two wives, eleven sons and a limp from the Jabbok.

I would rather you see the ridge than the village. Stand on any high point of the watershed at sunset and look at the ground. Stones everywhere. Any one of them is a pillow. That is the point. God was not in the place because it was Bethel. It became Bethel because God was in the place, and a running man found out.

If you are running from something you did, and have stopped for the night only because you could go no further, this is your stop. He does not wait until you have stopped running to say I am with you.

A prayer from this stop

God of Abraham and Isaac, and of Jacob who was running, you were in this place and we did not know it. Open our eyes to the stairway while we sleep on stone. Take our bargaining and give us back your promise unchanged. Keep us wherever we go, and bring us again to this land. Do not leave us until you have done what you have spoken.

Illustration

Studio plate, labelled as an illustration: the watershed ridge at dusk, stones in the foreground, the Jordan valley in haze to the east. No reconstruction of the pillar or the dream.

Source notes