1. After a pleasant halt among the pastures of Succoth, Jacob, we are told, crossed the Jordan and came to that green valley of Shechem which is set amongst the rough highlands of Ephraim, like an emerald in a circlet of brass. Here, in the midst of its gushing springs and verdant pastures, the patriarch purchased a plot of ground; here he dug his celebrated well; and here, for the first time upon the sacred soil of Canaan, he erected an altar, writing upon it the significant superscription, El-Elohe-Israel-God, the God of Israel. Heretofore he had spoken of Jehovah as the God of Abraham, or the Fear of Isaac; now, for the first time, he ventures to call God his God; and calls him, not the God of Jacob (his old name), but the God of Israel, his new name, the name which God Himself had just given him. It is as a new man, a changed and bettered man, that he ventures to think of God, not as far off, but near; not as the God of his good father and grandfather, but as his own God, whom he is bound to recognize and serve in all he does, and to whom he is bent on devoting his new life.
After all that had happened to Jacob, we should have expected him to make for Bethel as rapidly as his unwieldy company could be moved forward. But the pastures that had charmed the eye of his grandfather captivated Jacob as well. He bought land at Shechem, and appeared willing to settle there. The vows which he had uttered with such fervour when his future was precarious are apparently quite forgotten, or more probably neglected, now that danger seems past.
2. Out of this condition Jacob was roughly awakened. Sinning by unfaithfulness and softness towards his family, he was, according to the usual law, punished by family disaster of the most painful kind. Shechem dishonoured Jacob's daughter. But he loved her, and offered to pay for her any bridal price that might be imposed. The bargain was struck. Yet Simeon and Levi slew him, to avenge the purity of the family stained by union with an alien. Jacob himself was thoroughly indignant; the outrage he never could forget; but he was politic, and he did not interfere; he raised no difficulty; and when he came to speak of it he said to Simeon and Levi: “Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.” This rebuke sounds of the mildest; but none the less, as we happen to know in this case, Jacob felt much more than he cared to say. He never forgot their treachery and bloodthirstiness, and the pain it gave him. As he blessed his sons from his dying bed, this long-past deed turned the blessing of the two foremost actors in it into a curse.
3. The extermination of the men of Shechem, followed by the spoliation of all they possessed, made it imperative that Jacob should resume his wanderings. Afraid to stir a step alone, he asks counsel of the God who is now his God; and God bids him move southward on Bethel, nearer therefore to Hebron, where Isaac had dwelt. And at Bethel he is to make an altar to the God who had appeared to him when he fled from the face of Esau his brother; in other words, he is reminded of the vow he left at Bethel nearly thirty years ago, and is invited to fulfil it. The summons to go back to Bethel was equivalent to an invitation to return to that fervour, that devotion, and those holy vows which had made that bare mountain-pass the very house of God and the gate of heaven. “Come back; and be as near to Me as you were when you first set up that stone, and anointed it with oil.” It met with an instant response: “Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments: and let us arise, and go up to Bethel.”
For several years after his settlement at Shechem, held back it may be through the shame of his own unworthiness, or perhaps not yet fully awakened to the pernicious influence of idolatry, Jacob seems to have regarded the semi-heathen practices of his domestics with an over-easy toleration. But his leaving Shechem was a deed of repentance united with cleansing and putting away of the strange gods. God the Almighty commanded them to leave, and to cleanse, and the power of God protected them as they removed from the vengeance of the inhabitants round about. This great purification and renunciation is commanded in order that the covenant made with Jacob at Bethel thirty years before may not only be confirmed with him at the same spot, but be extended to his entire household. In Jacob's story Israel is taught through its ancestor Jacob that it should have laid aside the service of every other god the moment it trod the sacred soil of Canaan.
