1. Who appeared to you when you fled from Esau your brother. This clause, which takes us back to the dream-vision revelation and promise vouchsafed the young Jacob in chapter 28, signals this injunction to build an altar as a ritual completion of that early promise. (See the comment on verse 3.)

2. the alien gods. Although many interpreters associate these icons or figurines with the booty taken from Shechem, Rachel’s attachment to her father’s household gods suggests that others in this large retinue of emigrating relatives and slaves may have brought cultic figurines with them from Mesopotamia.

cleanse yourselves. Nahum Sarna aptly notes, “chapter 34 is dominated by the theme of defilement; this chapter opens with the subject of purification.”

3. to the God Who answered me on the day of my distress and was with me. When Jacob approximately echoes God’s words to him in verse 1, he replaces God’s revelation with God’s answering him in his trouble and being with him, thus confirming that God has fully responded to the terms he stipulated in 28:20, “If the LORD God be with me and guard me on this way that I am going.”

4. the rings . . . in their ears. As archaeology has abundantly discovered, earrings were often fashioned as figurines of gods and goddesses.

buried. The verb taman is generally used for placing treasure in a hidden or safe place, and is quite distinct from the term for burial that appears in verses 8, 19, and 29, which is a verb reserved for burying bodies.

5. the terror of God. Perhaps, in the view of this writer, which is more insistently theological than that of the immediately preceding narrative, the phrase means literally that God casts fear on the Canaanites in order to protect Jacob and his clan. But the phrase is deliberately ambiguous: it could also be construed as meaning “a fearsome terror,” with ʾelohim serving as an intensifier rather than referring to divinity. In that case, the shambles to which Simeon and Levi reduced Shechem might be sufficient reason for the terror.

8. Allon-Bacuth. The name means “oak of weeping.” Beyond the narrative etiology of a place-name, there is not enough evidence to explain what this lonely obituary notice is doing here.

9. And God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Paddan-Aram. The adverb “again,” as Rashi notes, alludes to God’s appearance to Jacob at this same place, Bethel, when he fled to Paddan-Aram. This second version of the conferring of the name of Israel on Jacob is thus set in the perspective of a large overview of his career of flight and return, with both his eastward and westward trajectory marked by divine revelation and promise at the same spot. The first story of Jacob’s name change is folkloric and mysterious, and the new name is given him as a token of his past victories in his sundry struggles with human and divine creatures. Here, the report of the name change is distinctly theological, God’s words invoking both the first creation (“be fruitful and multiply”) and His promise to Abraham (“kings shall come forth from your loins”). In this instance, moreover, the new name is a sign of Jacob’s glorious future rather than of the triumphs he has already achieved, and the crucial element of struggle is not intimated. As elsewhere in biblical narrative, the sequencing of different versions of the same event proposes different, perhaps complementary views of the same elusive subject—here, the central and enigmatic fact of the origins of the theophoric name of the Hebrew nation.

14. And Jacob set up a pillar. The cultic or commemorative pillar, matsevah, figures equally in the first episode at Bethel, in chapter 28. There, too, Jacob consecrates the pillar by pouring oil over it, but here, in keeping with the more pervasively ritualistic character of the story, he also offers a libation, and he builds an altar before setting up the pillar.

in the place where He had spoken with him. This phrase occurs three times in close sequence. The underlining of “place” recalls the emphasis on that key term in the earlier Bethel episode, where an anonymous “place” was transformed into a “house of God.” In the present instance, “place” is strongly linked through reiteration with the fact of God’s having spoken to Jacob: before the place is consecrated by human ritual acts, it is consecrated by divine speech.

16. some distance. The Hebrew, kivrat haʾarets, occurs only three times in the Bible, and there has been debate over what precisely it indicates. Abraham ibn Ezra, with his extraordinary philological prescience, suggested that the initial ki was the prefix of comparison (kaf hadimyon) and that the noun barat was “the royal measure of distance.” In fact, modern Semitic philologists have discovered an Akkadian cognate, beru, which is the ancient mile, the equivalent of about four and a half English miles.

17. for this one, too, is a son for you. Rachel, in her naming-speech for Joseph, had prayed for a second son, just as in her earlier imperious demand to her husband, she had asked him to give her sons, not a son. The fulfillment of her uncompromising wish entails her death.

18. Ben-Oni. The name can be construed to mean either “son of my vigor” or, on somewhat more tenuous philological grounds, “son of my sorrow.” Given the freedom with which biblical characters play with names and their meanings, there is no reason to exclude the possibility that Rachel is punningly invoking both meanings, though the former is more likely: in her death agony, she envisages the continuation of “vigor” after her in the son she has born (the tribe Benjamin will become famous for its martial prowess).

but his father called him Benjamin. In the reports given in biblical narrative, it is more often the mother who does the naming. This is the sole instance of competing names assigned respectively by the mother and father. Jacob’s choice of Bin-yamin also presents a possibility of double meaning. The most likely construal would be “son of the right hand,” that is, favored son, the one to whom is imparted special power or “dexterity.” But the right hand also designates the south in biblical idiom, so the name could mean “dweller in the south.” Again, the yamin component might be, as some have proposed, not the word for right hand but a plural of yom, “day” or “time,” yielding the sense “son of old age.”

22. Reuben went and lay with Bilhah. This enigmatic notice of Reuben’s violation of his father’s concubine is conveyed with gnomic conciseness. The Talmud saw in the story an intention on the part of Reuben to defile the slavegirl of his mother’s dead rival, Rachel, and so to make her sexually taboo to Jacob. More recent commentators have observed with justice that in the biblical world cohabitation with the consort of a ruler is a way of making claim to his authority (as when the usurper Absalom cohabits with his father David’s concubines), and so Reuben would be attempting to seize in his father’s lifetime his firstborn’s right to be head of the clan.

and Israel heard. The same verb is used when the report of the rape of Dinah is brought to Jacob. In both instances, he remains silent. The fact that he is referred to in this episode as Israel, not Jacob, may be dictated by the context of sexual outrage, for which the idiom “a scurrilous thing in Israel,” nevalah beYisraʾel, is used, as in the story of Dinah.

And the sons of Jacob were twelve. The genealogical list of the sons of Jacob, followed by the list of the sons of Ishmael in the next chapter, marks a major transition in the narrative. When the story picks up again at the beginning of chapter 37, though old Jacob is very much alive and an important figure in the background of the narrative, it will become the story of Joseph and his brothers—a tale that in all its psychological richness and moral complexity will take up the rest of the Book of Genesis.

29. And Isaac breathed his last. The actual chronological place of this event is obviously considerably earlier in the narrative. The biblical writers observe no fixed commitment to linear chronology, a phenomenon recognized by the rabbis in the dictum “there is neither early nor late in the Torah.”

Esau and Jacob his sons buried him. At this end point, they act in unison, and despite the reversal of birthright and blessing, the firstborn is mentioned first.