An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis Chapter Thirty Five

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God turns up again to personally tell Jacob to finally complete his journey home to see his father Isaac in Bethel. He tells Jacob to build a shrine-altar there to God. Why God peaking in the first person, refers to himself in the third person is never explained. It’s like one of Gollum’s conversation with his inner Smeagle in The Lord Of The Rings. Also, why isn’t Jacob just completing the journey anyway? His long delay near Sheckem just seemed to be shoehorned in for the sake of the terrible rape drama surrounding Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, in the previous chapter. Jacob tells his family and slaves what God just said, meaning the readers get a repeat of the passages just given a paragraph verse before, and Jacob commands everyone to dispose of their idols to any other god before they depart. It isn’t stated whether his wives dispose of their father’s stolen statues of his family gods referred to in earlier chapters. God hasn’t instructed this disposal of false idols. Jacob just demands it anyway. Jacob also collects all the rings everyone had in their ears and buries them in the desert. God creates a darkness round Jacob’s group ensuring that none of their enemies can follow them out as they escape the Sheckem region. Jacob arrives in Luz, also known as Bethel, in Canaan, and builds a shrine to God there. Almost as if it was a reward for the shrine, God now takes the life of Deborah, nurse slave to Rebekah who is buried there and the shrine area is renamed Allon Bacuth. God puts another direct appearance in for Jacob, and tells him that he is now rechristened Israel. This is very odd as God already did this back in chapter 32, after their bizarre wrestling tournament. God tells Jacob that his tribes will multiply, an extension of the promise made to Abraham and then to Isaac, neither of who lived to see the promise kept. Jacob pours oil and a drink (water or wine we are not told, just a drink) over the ground he stood on when talking to God and renames the land Bethel, even though he was sent to the land already called Bethel anyway. In the same spirit I hereby rename London as London. Doh! Jacob heads from Bethel towards his home town, Ephraph, and he is half way there when his wife Rachel dies in childbirth, though she dies taking comfort in the fact that her son, Ben-Oni, renamed Benjamin, survives. Jacob builds yet another shrine, and finally completes his journey to Ephraph, which we learn will later be called Bethlehem, where Jesus would eventually be born. After a pointless restatement list of the names of all Jacob’s sons Jacob returns to his father’s home at Mamre, near Ephraph, just in time for Isaac, his father to die aged one hundred and eighty. Jacob and Esau unite in grief for his funeral. Unusually after a chapter specifying where everyone’s burial shrines were built by Jacob, that of Isaac isn’t referred to at all. He died, they buried him. Game over. Rather an undignified end for such an important Biblical patriarch. Arthur Chappell