Bethlehem

Rachel's road

Amitai (Tai) Elon

Anchor: Genesis 35:16-20. World English Bible, public domain. Supporting passages are identified separately below.

Where we are

Bethlehem lies ten kilometres south of Jerusalem on the same ridge road that Jacob walked, at about seven hundred and seventy metres, on the edge where the hill country begins to fall away east into the Judean desert. From the town you can see the desert start. That edge is why shepherds have always kept flocks here: the grazing on the dry side, the town on the wet side.

Most people come to Bethlehem for one building, the Church of the Nativity over the cave where tradition says Jesus was born, the oldest church in continuous use in the Holy Land and a World Heritage site. This chapter is not about that building. It is about the road into town from the north, where at the entrance from Jerusalem, hard against the separation barrier, stands a small domed building called Rachel's Tomb, Kever Rachel.^rachel

I want to be careful here, more careful than usual, because this is one of the places in the book where the tradition and the text pull in different directions, and where the modern politics are heavy on the ground. So I will show you the road first, then the text, then the argument, and let you stand where you choose.

What happened, in order

Jacob has come home. After twenty years with Laban, the wrestling at the Jabbok, the meeting with Esau, and the horror at Shechem when his sons killed a city over their sister Dinah, God told him to go up to Bethel. He did, buried the household gods under the oak, built an altar, and received again the name Israel and the promise of land and nations. That is Genesis 31 to 35:15, supporting.

The anchor begins with the family moving on from Bethel, south along the ridge. Rachel, the wife Jacob worked fourteen years for, is pregnant with her second child. Before they reach Ephrath, labour begins, and it is hard. The midwife tells her not to fear, she is having another son. As her life goes out of her, she names the boy Ben-oni, which means son of my sorrow, or son of my strength; the Hebrew can carry both. His father names him Benjamin, son of the right hand.

Rachel dies and is buried on the way to Ephrath, which the text glosses as Bethlehem. Jacob sets up a pillar on her grave, and the writer adds that it is the pillar of Rachel's grave "to this day."

That is the whole passage. Five verses. The rest of chapter 35 records Reuben's sin with Bilhah, the list of the twelve sons, and Isaac's death at Mamre, where Esau and Jacob bury him together.

What they were after, and the turn

Rachel wanted children. That was her whole story from the day Leah bore Reuben. Give me children or I die, she told Jacob in Genesis 30:1, and he answered in anger that he was not God. When Joseph was finally born she named him "may he add," asking for another. Now the other comes, on a road, and it kills her. The text does not soften the irony and neither will I. She got what she asked for, and the price was her life.

Jacob wanted, I think, to get his family safely home. He is an old man now with a limp, moving a huge household south through country where his sons have just made his name a stench. And on the road he loses the one person he chose.

The turn is in the naming. Rachel, dying, names the boy for her grief. Jacob, living, renames him for strength. Some readers hear a father overriding a dying mother's wish, and there is grief in that. I hear something else as well. Jacob has spent his life as the second son, the grasper of heels, and here at last he names a son "right hand," the place of honour, and refuses to let the boy carry his mother's death as his name. It is the first thing Jacob does in the whole book that looks like a father blessing rather than a son grasping. It costs him Rachel to get there.

And then the pillar. He raised a pillar at Bethel for God. He raises one here for her. The two stones bracket the journey.

The Eastern lens

A Western reader sees a burial on the road as a sad necessity. An Eastern reader feels it as a wound. Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah and Leah are all in the cave at Machpelah, the family tomb bought for silver. Rachel is not. She lies alone by a roadside, outside the tomb of the house she married into. Jacob will say on his deathbed in Egypt, in Genesis 48:7, that Rachel died "by me" on the road and he buried her there, and you can hear that it still troubles him. In a culture where where you are buried says who you belong to, Rachel's grave outside the family cave is why later Israel imagined her as the mother who weeps for the children on the road, the one who is not at rest.^honour

Look for him

Matthew reaches for Rachel. When Herod kills the boys of Bethlehem, Matthew 2:18 quotes Jeremiah 31:15, a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing comfort because they are no more. Jeremiah's Ramah, north of Jerusalem, was where captives were gathered for the road to Babylon, and Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, weeps there for all her children going into exile. Matthew hears it again at Bethlehem because Rachel's tomb is there in his day. And Matthew 2:6 quotes Micah 5:2, Bethlehem Ephrathah, the ruler who comes from you. The Ephrath of our anchor is the Ephrathah of Micah. These are Matthew's readings, and the tradition that connects Rachel's road to the road of Mary is his, not the Genesis text's. I hold it as his, and I do not find it hard to hold.

The later story of this ground

Bethlehem is Ruth's town, where a Moabite widow gleaned in the field of Boaz and became the great-grandmother of David, Ruth 1 to 4. It is where Samuel anointed David from among Jesse's sons in 1 Samuel 16, and where David longed for water from the well by the gate while the Philistines held it, 2 Samuel 23:15. Micah 5:2 names it as the birthplace of a ruler whose origins are from ancient days. Luke 2 and Matthew 2 place the birth of Jesus here, and Matthew places Herod's slaughter. The Church of the Nativity was built by Constantine in the fourth century and rebuilt by Justinian in the sixth, and Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in a cave beside it.

Where the writer stood

The writer stood beside a pillar. "To this day" is the tell. Someone in Israel or Judah knew a standing stone on the road that people called Rachel's grave, and wrote this to say why it was there. That puts the writer's feet on the ridge road, in a time when the stone was still known. Whether it was at Bethlehem or at Ramah in Benjamin is the argument below.^hayes

What is contested

Where Rachel died. Genesis says on the way to Ephrath, and glosses Ephrath as Bethlehem, which is south of Jerusalem in Judah. But 1 Samuel 10:2 places Rachel's tomb "in the border of Benjamin," and Jeremiah 31:15 puts her weeping at Ramah, which is north of Jerusalem in Benjamin. Benjamin's territory never reached Bethlehem. Many scholars therefore think the original tradition put the tomb north of Jerusalem, near Ramah, and that the gloss "that is Bethlehem" was added by a later hand, or that there was a second Ephrath in Benjamin. The tomb at the entrance to Bethlehem is attested from the fourth century AD; the present building is Ottoman, enlarged by Sir Moses Montefiore in 1841. It is a place of real prayer, especially for Jewish women, and a place of real politics, enclosed since 2005 by the barrier and reached from the Jerusalem side. I show you both traditions and tell you the text has both.^rachel

Ben-oni. Son of my sorrow is the usual reading, and the contrast with Benjamin supports it. But on can mean vigour as well as trouble, and a few readers take Rachel's name as strength, not grief. The Hebrew allows it; the context leans to sorrow.

Standing here today

Bethlehem is under the Palestinian Authority and Israeli citizens may not enter its centre; foreign visitors pass through the checkpoint from Jerusalem. Rachel's Tomb is on the Israeli side of the barrier, reached by a walled road from Jerusalem, open most days with security at the door. The Church of the Nativity and Manger Square are inside the city, and the Shepherds' Fields are in Beit Sahour, the next town east. Check the situation before you go; it changes.

For this chapter I would stand on the road. Whichever tomb you can reach, or neither, find the ridge road south of Jerusalem and look towards the desert edge. A family walked this way with the flocks, and a woman died in labour somewhere along it, and a man set up a stone. The stone was still there when someone wrote it down.

If you have lost the person you chose, on a road you did not choose, and you have a child to name, this is your stop. Name him for the right hand. Raise the stone. Keep walking; there is a town ahead.

A prayer from this stop

God of Jacob and Rachel, you know the road where we lost what we loved. Do not let our children carry our sorrow as their name. Give us the strength to name them for the right hand. Stand with the mother who weeps and will not be comforted. And from Bethlehem, small among the clans, bring the one you promised.

Illustration

Licensed public photo: the ridge road towards Bethlehem with the desert edge visible, or the dome of Rachel's Tomb labelled as the tradition, not the proven site. Tai's own Bethlehem footage should be checked before a plate is commissioned.

Source notes