Return to Bethel
Genesis 34:1-35:291
February 4, 2007

Today’s message is from Genesis chapters 34 through 36. We won’t read it all, but it’s all the word of God. God put it in the Bible for us to know him through it—and to know ourselves, too! So, remember that as we read. (What we don’t read this morning, you read it all yourself when you get home.)

Also, as always, I exhort all of you to read the word of God every day. Let God’s Holy Spirit write it in your heart. There are commands from God in the Bible, but more than that there are stories about ordinary people that teach you what is good and what isn’t. They put a desire in your heart to do what is good and to avoid the evil. So read the word of God!

[Prayer]

Today, I’m going to talk about Genesis chapters 34, 35 and 36, but the heart of these chapters is really the first 15 verses of chapter 35. This is where God sent Jacob back to Bethel, the place where he had first encountered God. (Do you remember the stairway to heaven with the angels ascending and descending on it?) But, before I talk about that, I’m going to start with chapter 34 and we’ll see what happened before God told Jacob to go back to Bethel.

You remember in chapter 33 that Jacob had met with Esau, his brother, and that, although he was really afraid that Esau might kill him—he was coming to meet him with 400 men—Esau was happy to see Jacob and greeted him warmly. Esau wanted Jacob to come back home with him, but Jacob made excuses and instead settled in the Canaanite city of Shechem. Nothing good came out his decision to do this, as we’ll see.

Let me just read the first paragraph of chapter 34. Jacob had just purchased property near Shechem, built an altar there and had settled down. I’m going to read verses 1 through 4:

1Dinah, Leah’s daughter whom she bore to Jacob, went out to see some of the young women of the area. 2When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, a prince of the region, saw her, he took her and raped her. 3He became infatuated with Dinah, daughter of Jacob. He loved the young girl and spoke tenderly to her. 4“Get me this girl as a wife,” he told his father Hamor. (Genesis 34:1-4)

Now let me make just one comment about this. It seems inconsistent that Shechem could have loved Dinah and spoken tenderly to her and yet forcibly raped her.  But this was a different culture. I believe that Shechem really did love Dinah and had tender-hearted feelings toward her. He really wanted to marry her.

Now, I’m going to repeat some speculation about this event that Matthew Henry made in his commentary (Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible). This goes back more than 300 years. I’m going to paraphrase briefly what Matthew Henry says. (He took more words than I’m going to take.)

Matthew Henry suggested that Dinah, being probably an only daughter, a teenager of 16 or 17, was somewhat spoiled—the center of attention. Matthew Henry believed that Dinah went, likely without the knowledge of her father Jacob, not only to see the other girls, but also to be seen by them. Well, she was seen by the wrong person and got into lots of trouble. Matthew Henry also commented on the fact that Shechem was referred to as a prince, and as such, likely felt that he could get whatever he wanted.

These things had never occurred to me, and I don’t know that Matthew Henry was right, but I do think that you have to “read between the lines” in the Bible quite a bit. The Bible has a lot of words and a lot of pages, but generally, it’s highly condensed. I think it’s good to think about what the circumstances might have been in a particular situation when they are not explicitly spelled out. Of course we can’t conclude that our speculations are facts. But still, it’s good to examine all the possibilities.

In any case, if you read on further, you will see that Hamor (Shechem’s father) approached Jacob and his sons about giving Dinah in marriage to Shechem. He proposed that their clans live together and intermarry. However, Jacob’s sons were outraged that Shechem had defiled their sister and gave a deceitful answer. They told Hamor that, in order for them to accept his proposal, all the men of the city would have to be circumcised and become just as they were. What they were really planning was to take revenge. They were planning to murder all of the men of the city.

Well, Hamor agreed to the terms and persuaded the other in the city to go along, which they did.  But while they were still helpless and recovering from their surgery, Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi went into the city and killed all the men. Here’s what Jacob said. This is from verses 30 and 31 at then end of chapter 34:

30Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me, making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites. We are few in number; if they unite against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed.”
31But they answered, “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” (Genesis 34:30, 31)

Well, let me make a few comments. You know that Jacob had wrestled with the Angel of the Lord, and even when the Angel of the Lord dislocated Jacob’s hip, Jacob would not let go until he received his blessing—God’s blessing. He received it. At that point, Jacob was a new person—no longer Jacob the deceiver, but Israel. But there was still a lot left for God to do before the ‘Jacob’ was completely gone from Israel. (God still has a lot to do with us, too!) Notice that, in Jacob’s rebuke to Simeon and Levi, he seemed only to be worried about the consequences to himself and his family (what if they unite and attack me), rather that the fact that his sons had murdered a bunch of innocent people. He was still worried more about his own hide than about whether or not his family had done the right thing before God.

Now, this murder happened before the Ten Commandments. But, if you go back to Genesis chapter 9, you will see that God had already forbade murder: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his image.” (Gen. 9:6)

God commanded the Israelites to destroy all the pagans in the land of Canaan when he sent them to take over the land several hundred years later. And you might argue that the people in the city of Shechem were also pagan Canaanites, so what was wrong with killing them all? Well, for one thing, God didn’t command it. But the real facts were that Jacob’s people were also worshipping pagan gods at that time. God still had a lot of work to do on Jacob and on his sons also. (His sons had grown up around Uncle Laban and around Uncle Laban’s sons and had picked up some bad ideas. We’ll see more of that in chapter 37 and later, too.)

Now let’s go on to chapter 35. Let’s read the first 15 verses:

1God said to Jacob, “Get up! Go to Bethel and settle there. Build an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau.”
2So Jacob said to his family and all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods that are among you. Purify yourselves and change your clothes. 3We must get up and go to Bethel. I will build an altar there to the God who answered me in my day of distress. He has been with me everywhere I have gone.”
4Then they gave Jacob all their foreign gods and their earrings, and Jacob hid them under the oak near Shechem.
5 When they set out, a terror from God came over the cities around them, and they did not pursue Jacob’s sons 6So Jacob and all who were with him came to Luz (that is, Bethel) in the land of Canaan. 7Jacob built an altar there and called the place God of Bethel because it was there that God had revealed Himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother.
8Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak south of Bethel. So Jacob named it Oak of Weeping.
9God appeared to Jacob again after he returned from Paddan-aram, and He blessed him. 10God said to him:
Your name is Jacob;
you will no longer be named Jacob,
but Israel will be your name.

So He named him Israel. 11God also said to him:

I am God Almighty.
Be fruitful and multiply.
A nation, indeed an assembly of nations,
will come from you,
and kings will descend from you.
12  The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac
I will give to you.
And I will give the land
to your descendants after you.

13Then God withdrew from him at the place where He had spoken to him.
14 Jacob set up a marker at the place where He had spoken to him—a stone marker. He poured a drink offering on it and anointed it with oil. 15Jacob named the place where God had spoken with him Bethel. (Genesis 35:1-15)

Jacob had stopped in the wrong place. God really wanted him to go back to the place where Jacob had first met him, not face-to-face as when he had wrestled with the Angel of the Lord, but in a dream. God told Jacob to go back to Bethel and to build an altar there.

What was the first thing Jacob did after God told him to go back to Bethel? Look at verse 2. Jacob told his family to get rid of all the foreign gods and to purify themselves. You see, there had been foreign gods—idols—among Laban’s people. Rachel had stolen Laban’s household idols and hidden them when Laban came after him. Jacob obviously knew that his family had the foreign gods (or else he wouldn’t have told them to get rid of them). But he hadn’t done anything about it until just now. (We should not wait so long to tell our families to get rid of any ‘foreign gods’. We should not hesitate about getting rid of any foreign gods ourselves!)

In verse 3, Jacob acknowledged that God had been with him wherever he went. They buried all the foreign gods—the idols—at Shechem and set out for Bethel. When they arrived, Jacob built the altar as God had commanded him to do.

Verse 8 tells us that Rebekah’s nurse Deborah died and was buried.  And verses 9 through 12 tell us that God appeared to Jacob again.  God reiterated the change of Jacob’s name from Jacob to Israel, from he who deceives (because that was his nature) to he struggles with God (because he had struggled with God and with men and prevailed). (You know that in the Bible, people’s names stand for who they are. Do you believe in the name of Jesus? That means you believe in who Jesus is!)

God also told Jacob (now Israel), “I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation, indeed an assembly of nations, will come from you, and kings will descend from you. The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you. And I will give the land to your descendants after you.” God identified himself, first of all, as God Almighty. He is the God above all gods.  He is the maker of the heavens and the earth. He is our Creator and he is our redeemer. He is God Almighty. He gave Jacob the same command that he gave Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.”

God told Jacob that a nation would come from him—and, indeed, an assembly of nations. I’m not sure just what that means—an assembly of nations. The nation certainly has to be the nation of Israel. Matthew Henry says that all of the 12 tribes of Israel are also nations in themselves. But I think it may have a spiritual meaning. God has made Jewish believers and the Gentile believers into one body, one man. (You can check it out in Ephesians, chapter 2.) I think all of the people who believe in Jesus may be the assembly of nations.

God told Jacob that kings would descend from him. Kings did come from him. Just read 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. But really, it was the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords that came through Jacob and his descendants.

In verse 12, God reiterated the promise that he had made to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham and to his father Isaac, that he would give the land to him and his descendants. Jacob hasn’t taken possession of it yet, but he will!

Verse 13 says, “Then God withdrew from him at the place where He had spoken to him.” It says God withdrew from Jacob, but I don’t think God really withdrew from Jacob. He just didn’t speak to him for a while. God may speak to us or he may not speak to us, but he never withdraws from us when we have put our trust in Jesus. He didn’t really withdraw from Jacob, either. Jacob marked the place where God had spoken to him with a stone marker, I think as a reminder. He named the place Bethel, the House of God.

Verses 16 through 20—I’m not going to read them—tell us about Rachel’s death. She died giving birth to Jacob’s youngest son, Benjamin. This is the woman that Jacob had originally wanted to marry when he managed to get four wives (or two wives and two concubines) out of the deal. She died young. One of the commentaries pointed out that she was the one who had stolen the household idols from her father Laban. I don’t know whether there was any connection or not.

Verses 21 through 26 give us the list of Jacob’s sons. These are the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel from whom the Jewish nation came. I think it’s significant that God (through Moses, who is the human author of Genesis) chose to list each of the patriarch’s mothers. He did that with some of the mothers in Jesus’s genealogy, too.

Verses 27, 28 and 29 tell us about the death and burial of Jacob’s father Isaac. He lived to be 180 years old. Jacob and Esau buried him.

I’m not going to say much about chapter 36, but I included it because it’s in the word of God. It’s about Esau’s descendants. (When I read the Bible, I try to read the genealogies even though they seem to be a list of names that don’t mean much to us. They are there for a reason and sometime they include a few interesting details about some of the people’s lives.) The descendants of Esau, the Edomites, were generally at odds with Israel throughout their history. Verse 7 tells that Esau had a great deal of wealth, just as Jacob did. They moved to the mountains of Seir (verse 8) because they had to many possession to stay close together. (Incidentally, if you have seen the Indiana Jones movie where they are looking for the Holy Grail, the place where it was supposed to be, the place that looked like it had some pillars and windows and so forth carved into the side of a cliff, that’s where the Edomites lived. It’s a real place.)

Well, next time, we’ll start chapter 37. Chapters 37 through the end of chapter 50 tell us about how God moved the fledgling nation of Israel to the land of Egypt where, later, he would multiply them and refine them before bringing them back to the land of Canaan. It’s an amazing story. It’s a story of love and grace and of repentance and forgiveness. If I had to choose, I would say that it’s my favorite part of the Bible.

Now, before I finish, I want to recall a couple of things that I’ve talked about in earlier chapters of Genesis. When Jacob first encountered God in chapter 28, when he had his dream in which he saw the stairway to heaven with God’s angels ascending and descending on it and with the Lord standing at the top, it was a prophetic dream. Jesus told Nathaniel in John chapter 1, “You will see greater things than these. I assure you: You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” (John 1:30b, 31) The stairway represents Jesus. Jesus is the way to heaven! And there is no way to heaven but through Jesus!

In Genesis, chapter 32, when Jacob wrestled with the man (I called him the Angel of the Lord when I talked about it a few minutes ago), Jacob was wrestling with Jesus. There are many scriptures that make that clear. He wasn’t called Jesus at that time, but he was there. He was there at the beginning, in fact. All things that were made were made through him and for him. He was also there at the burning bush in Exodus. He was there in the desert when the Israelites were going from Egypt to Canaan. And he was there to talk to Joshua as the commander of the Lord’s armies. In fact he was always there and always will be. He is without beginning of days or end of life. He is a high priest forever. He is our high priest too. He is our Savior. He is Jesus!

God told Jacob to return to Bethel where he had seen the stairway to heaven. Jacob placed a marker there, I think to remember the place where he had met God. I believe it’s good for us to remember the place (or places) where we met Jesus, too.

[Prayer]



END NOTES
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible ®, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible ®, Holman CSB ® and HCSB ® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.