“Now Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak outside Bethel. So it was named Allon Bakuth.”-Genesis 35:8 Suddenly out of the blue, the death of Rebecca’s much beloved nurse Deborah is reported to us. If you recall that when Abraham’s servant Eliezer brought Rebecca back from Mesopotamia to be Isaac’s wife, she was accompanied by […]

“Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes.  Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.”-Genesis 35:2-3 I mentioned in my last post […]

Today we begin Genesis Chapter 35. For the Complete Jewish Bible, click here. For the King James Version, click here. God said to Jacob, “Get up, go up to Beit-El and live there, and make there an altar to God, who appeared to you when you fled ‘Esau your brother.”-Genesis 35:1 I’m sure anybody who […]

Did God call Jacob to go to Shechem? Absolutely not! Okay, technically it’s in the promised land. But it’s not where God called Jacob to go. He was supposed to travel to Hebron. And as we have already seen, in the final analysis, this “partial obedience” resulted in the rape of his daughter and the […]

But Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have caused me trouble by making me stink in the opinion of the local inhabitants, the Kena‘ani and the P’rizi. Since I don’t have many people, they’ll align themselves together against me and attack me; and I will be destroyed, I and my household.”–Genesis 34:30 So King […]