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Abstract

The Priestly story of Jacob at Bethel in Gen. 35.9–15 is commonly interpreted as a Priestly delegitimization of the pre-Priestly Jacob/Bethel story in Gen. 28.10–22*. This interpretation has arisen largely from the different ways in which the texts conceptualize the maqôm and maṣṣēbôt, with the Priestly text supposedly desacralizing the standing stone and turning the ‘place’ into merely a location of remembrance, not the dwelling of the deity. This article challenges this assumption, especially addressing the similarities between the Priestly conceptions of Bethel and the redactional ‘vow narrative’ in Gen. 28.20–22*. It then relates the redaction-critical findings with the historical situation at sixth-century Bethel, which seems to have been the main cultic site in Yehud during the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. On the basis of this analysis, the article concludes with the suggestion that Bethel be taken more seriously as a possible compositional context of P.

Keywords

Bethel Genesis Pentateuch Priestly Writing Yehud

1. Introduction

The ancestral narratives of Gen. 12–36 identify Bethel as one of the most important locations in the southern Levant for cultic activity concerning ‘biblical Israel’. Upon his first arrival in Canaan, Abraham constructs an altar east of the place (Gen. 12.8). Jacob stops at Bethel overnight en route to Harran, where Yhwh appears to him for the first time and gives him the ancestral promise; Jacob then declares the place to be ‘the house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’, erects a standing stone there, and promises to return, should God keep him safe on his journey (Gen. 28.10–22). Return he does, concluding a series of etiological narratives relating the patriarch to Mahanaim (32.1–2), Penuel (32.22–32), Succoth (33.17), and Shechem (33.18–20). A Deuteronomistically styled text tells of God then calling Jacob from Shechem to Bethel to fulfil his promise (35.1–5). Jacob subsequently goes from Shechem to Luz, ‘that is Bethel’, builds an altar there, and names it ‘El-bethel’ (35.6–7). Here, the Priestly text takes over, telling of God appearing to Jacob ‘again in his coming from Paddam-aram’ (35.9) and giving him the Priestly ancestral promise (35.10–12). God leaves Jacob, and Jacob marks the spot with a standing stone and names it ‘Bethel’ (35.13–15). The story of Joseph and the ‘eisodus’ begins shortly thereafter (Gen. 37), and as the Israelites leave the promised land for Egypt, Bethel disappears from view within the Pentateuchal narrative.

Scholars commonly identify Bethel as the place of composition for many pre-Priestly biblical texts (see, e.g., Blum 2012: 210; De Pury 1991; 2006; Finkelstein & Römer 2014; Na’aman 2014: 325–328). Among these, the pre-Priestly Jacob/Bethel texts in Gen. 28 and 35 (which are not part of the earliest Jacob texts in Genesis) even turned the Jacob story into a hieros logos for the southern sanctuary of the former kingdom of Israel (see, e.g., the genre discussion in Blum 1984: 25–35, and further Blum 2012: 191–192; Hensel 2021a; Van Seters 1992: 291–292; Westermann 1985: 452; Wöhrle 2021). The Priestly story of Jacob at Bethel is found in Gen. 35.9–15 and functions like a doublet of the pre-Priestly story in Gen. 28. The most common scholarly assumption is that the Priestly version was written in direct response to Gen. 28, seeking to mute and delegitimize the strong connection between Jacob and the Bethelite sanctuary (see, e.g., Blum 1984: 268–269). In what follows, I present the common interpretation of the Jacob/Bethel texts in detail (§ 2) before reanalysing the Priestly reception of Gen. 28 (§ 3), arguing that the Priestly Writing actually shows a decidedly positive reception of the pre-Priestly Bethel traditions. I then turn to the question of historical Bethel in the sixth century BCE (§ 4), highlighting its likely role as the cultic centre of Neo-Babylonian and early Persian Yehud—the exact time that most scholars believe the Priestly Writing to have been produced. This leads to the proposal that, despite the longstanding tendency for scholars to look to either exilic Babylonia or postexilic Jerusalem for the compositional setting of P, the sanctuary at Bethel is perhaps worth serious consideration for this as well (see Fritz 1977: 154–157; Guillaume 2009: 183–187; Meek 1929: 157; Rofé 1999: 75–76; 2003: 792–793).

2. Jacob at Bethel in Genesis 28 and 35

There is no question that the Jacob story as it now stands is the product of a series of major revisions, with the Jacob/Laban stories being oriented towards the north and interactions with the Arameans and the Jacob/Esau stories being oriented towards the south and interactions with the Edomites (see variously, e.g., already Gunkel 1919: 351–362, and Blum 1984: 190–200; Finkelstein and Römer 2014: 321–332; Hensel 2021a; Wöhrle 2021; cf. Frevel 2018: 352–353 and Tröndle 2023, passim for the argument that Esau’s association with Edom came only later). The resultant combined Jacob/Laban/Esau narrative ended somewhere in Gen. 33*, with the pre-Priestly material in Gen. 35 being added later (e.g., Blum 1984: 7–65; 2000; 2012). This pre-Priestly material was then taken up by a Priestly author (or authors) in the construction of a larger narrative of ‘ancestors and exodus’ that concluded with the giving of the law atop Mount Sinai.

Genesis 28.10–22* offers the first instance of Jacob coming to the ‘place’ that he ultimately renames ‘Bethel’. Upon his arrival, he sleeps upon a rock and receives a dream of angels ascending and descending a ziggurat reaching to the heavens (vv. 11–12; so also Gen. 11.1–9).¹ As he looks upon the ziggurat, Yhwh appears to him and gives him a blessing of multiplication and a promise to return him to the land while referencing an experience of exile (vv. 13–15). Jacob then wakes from his dream, declares that ‘Yhwh is in this place’ (אכן ישׁ יהוה במקום הזה; v. 16), becomes afraid and calls the place ‘awesome’ (ויירא ויאמר מה נורא המקום הזה), ‘the house of God’ (בית אלהים), and ‘the gate of heaven’ (שׁער השׁמים; v. 17). He then takes the rock, sets it up as a standing stone (מצבה), and pours oil on it (v. 18). He subsequently vows that, should God protect him, Yhwh shall be his god and ‘this stone … shall be God’s house’ (‎ אלהים‎‎‎ בית ‎ יהיה ‎. . .‎ ‎הזאת ‎ והאבן; v. 22).

Yhwh’s speech during the dream in vv. 13–15, Jacob’s recognition of Yhwh in v. 16, and Jacob’s vow in vv. 20–22 are all later non-Priestly intrusions into the earlier Bethel narrative (and v. 21b probably even later), as is the equation of Bethel with Luz within v. 19 (see similarly Levin 1993: 216–220, whose Yahwistic narrative comprises vv. 10–12, 16–19a).² The dream itself, which belongs to the base text, is constructed through several motifs almost certainly adapted from Assyrian and Babylonian literature concerning the foundation of Mesopotamian temples (see Hurowitz 2006; Koch 2018: 74–80; Na’aman 2014: 100–103, and for the Jacob story more generally also Hamori 2011). This narrative arc is then closed in Gen. 35.6–7*, which is the pre-Priestly report of Jacob returning to Bethel. This time, Jacob builds an altar and calls ‘the place’ (ויקרא למקום) ‘El-bethel’ (אל בית אל).

After a non-Priestly notice about Deborah and an oak in Gen. 35.8, the story continues with the Priestly contribution to the Jacob/Bethel narrative. Here, God appears to Jacob on his way back from Paddan-aram (v. 9). In v. 10, Jacob’s name is changed to ‘Israel’ without an accompanying etiology, in what is probably the earlier report of this (see Wöhrle 2012: 88–90, with further literature therein). P then continues in vv. 11–12, in which God gives Jacob the typical blessing of multiplication and promise of the land. In v. 13, God goes up from him (ויעל מעליו אלהים) ‘at the place where he spoke to him’ (במקום אשׁר דבר אתו). Jacob erects another standing stone (מצבה) in v. 14 ‘at the place where he spoke to him’ (במקום אשׁר דבר אתו), offers a libation offering, and pours oil on it. Then in v. 15, Jacob calls ‘the place where he spoke to him’ (המקום אשׁר דבר אתו) ‘Bethel’.³

The common interpretation of the Priestly unit has been that it represents a retelling of the story in Gen. 28 in order to delegitimize certain aspects that would be problematic from a Priestly point of view (e.g., Blum 1984: 268–269; Carr 1996: 89–90; De Pury 2006: 62–65; Hutzli 2023: 178; Koch 2018: 220–225). This hypothesis is acceptable when one views P as a previously independent document, in which Gen. 35.9–15 would have been written as a complete replacement of Gen. 28* (e.g., Carr 1996: 89; De Pury 2000: 46–48). But it is less convincing when seeing P as a redactional layer, especially since the ‘correction’ of Gen. 28.10–22* is written at a completely different part of the narrative.⁴ To this point, certain aspects of the Priestly passage in 35.9–15 suggest that it was written for its present context within the non-Priestly narrative rather than as part of an independent work: God appears to Jacob ‘in his coming [בבאו] from Paddan-aram’ (v. 9), thereby presupposing the movement reported in the preceding non-Priestly narrative.⁵ Furthermore, Gen. 35.9–15 is the only Priestly text in which God appears to Jacob. Nevertheless, it reports God appearing to Jacob ‘again [עוד] in his coming from Paddan-aram’.⁶ It seems most likely that ‘the [Priestly] author is complementing rather than replacing the pre-Priestly Bethel etiology’ (Hutzli 2023: 178), that is, that P is redactional here rather than constituting a self-standing narrative. It is therefore curious that P decided to leave the allegedly problematic Jacob/Bethel texts in Gen. 28 alone and then place its own text about the foundation of Bethel at a later position rather than leaving out or directly intervening within the supposedly problematic text.

Arguments for the delegitimization hypothesis, whether from a ‘complementary’ view with P as a redactional layer or a ‘replacement’ view with P as an independent document, have focused primarily on two features within the narrative: the ‘(cultic) place’ (מקום) and the standing stone (מצבה; see Blum 1984: 268–269; Koch 2018: 222–225):

1) The central point of Gen. 28.10–19* (20–22*) is that God dwells at Bethel (calling ‘this place’ [המקום הזה] both the ‘house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’; 28.17), while P merely calls Bethel ‘the place [המקום] where God spoke to Jacob’ (35.13–15, 3x). Jacob’s miraculous dream of ‘God’s house’ in Gen. 28 is thereby reduced to God only speaking to Jacob in Gen. 35. P then tells of God ‘leaving’ (*עלה) the place, undercutting the non-P statement.

2) Gen. 28 consecrates Jacob’s pillow-stone into a cultic standing stone when he pours an oil offering on it (ויצק שׁמן על ראשׁה; v. 18b). P takes this up verbatim but reconceptualizes it as merely a libation offering (ויסך עליה נסך ויצק עליה שׁמן) and not, in this case, also the consecration of a cultic object. In P, the standing stone is emphasized as a (regular) stone (מצבת אבן; ‎ 35.14a) that seems only to memorialize where God spoke to Jacob. The entire purpose of the standing stone in Gen. 35 is to correct its characterization as a cultic object in Gen. 28.

Genesis 28; 35 certainly attests to an innerbiblical debate about the presence of the deity related to the (cultic) place and the standing stone first reported in 28.10–19*. But these arguments framing P’s ‘doublet’ of Gen. 28.10–22* as an attempt to discredit the entire sanctuary at Bethel seem to me to be an interpretive step too far. Further investigation into the exact relationship between the cultic ‘place’ and the standing stone, not only in Gen. 28.10–19* and 35.9–15 but also in Gen. 28.20–22*, paints quite a different picture concerning how and why the Priestly narrative differs from the pre-Priestly texts.⁷

3. On cultic ‘places’ and standing stones

The lexeme מקום is common across the ancestral narratives for indicating the etiology of place names (e.g., 21.31 [Beersheva]; 22.14 [Yhwh-yireh]; 32.2 [Mahanaim]; 32.30 [Penuel]; 33.17 [Succoth]). It is also frequently used with a possessive suffix to mean ‘home’ (e.g., 29.26; 30.25; 31.55). Yet, in many cases, it also clearly designates a cultic ‘place’ (e.g., עד מקום שׁכם עד אלון מורה ‘until the maqôm of Shechem, until the oak of Moreh’ in 12.6). This cultic meaning of מקום is found most prominently in Deuteronomic literature, where the Deuteronomic program limits worship of Yhwh to a single מקום (Deut. 12.5, 11, 21, 26; 14.24–25; 16.6; 17.8; 18.6; 26.2; also Josh. 9.27; Neh. 1.9). The book of Jeremiah adopts this usage rather frequently, especially in the ‘Temple Sermon’ of ch. 7 that uses המקום הזה to refer to the temple sanctuary (vv. 3, 6–7, 12, 14, 20; see Leuchter 2005). It is used similarly in the book of Ezekiel, where Yhwh’s exile consists of him leaving his מקום (Ezek. 3.12; also 43.7). This cultic use of מקום ‘place’ permeates the Jacob/Bethel stories from their very beginning.⁸

A major component of the argument outlined above is that P sought to shift the presence of God from within the temple (the בית אלהים of 28.17, 22) to the divine sphere by telling of God ‘leaving’ or ‘going up’ from the place (*עלה), thereby implicitly rejecting the hieros logos in Gen. 28 (see already Gross 1968: 335–337 fn. 4; followed by, e.g., Blum 1984: 268; De Pury 2000: 47; Koch 2018: 223). Yet, there are reasons to doubt that this was the author’s intention:

1) The report of the divine speech to Jacob parallels the Priestly blessing of Abraham in Gen. 17 in several respects, including the use of *עלה‎ + מעל + P.N./suff. for God’s departure following the blessing (17.22; see Wöhrle 2012: 88, and further, e.g., Arnold 2009: 304). The choice to have God ‘leave’ or ‘go up’ may therefore have less to do with temple rejection than with the Priestly conception of theophany, which ends with the deity ‘going up’.

2) Accordingly, a Priestly statement that the deity is ‘beyond’ habitation within a stone would fit well with P’s more cosmological dimension of the deity than its pre-P counterparts and need not imply a complete rejection of the sanctuary.

3) P (unlike the pre-P Jacob story) anticipates the great theophany at Sinai, far from the land of Canaan. God’s departure from the sanctuary may therefore be less a historical statement denying his presence at Bethel than a literary statement ahead of the soon-to-come sojourn in Egypt.

Then there is the matter of the ‘desacralization’ of the standing stone. The (first) standing stone’s significance comes from Jacob having used it as a pillow when he received the vision (v. 18), but it says nothing about where exactly the stone was erected. Genesis 35.13–15 (P), on the other hand, places the importance of the (second) standing stone in its location, that is, where exactly the deity appeared to Jacob. The patriarch marking ‘the place [מקום] where God spoke to Jacob’ in P may have been intended to limit the application of maqôm-theology to a single cultic object at a single important spot rather than speaking of all of Bethel as the ‘place’ [מקום], the ‘house’, and the ‘gate’ as Gen. 28.10–19* does. This increased spatial exclusivity of the cult fits with the general cultic exclusivity characteristic of Priestly texts. At the same time, this question of ‘open’ versus ‘exclusive’ is not limited to the original Bethel narrative (28.10–19*) and its Priestly successor (35.9–15). Another pre-Priestly Bethel text, the narrative of Jacob’s vow at the standing stone in Gen. 28.20–22*, shares with the P text many aspects of the so-called polemical reorientation, yet it explicitly conceptualizes Bethel as the dwelling place of the deity (v. 22). It seems to me more likely that some of the alleged delegitimizations in the Priestly version actually come from it preferring the theological conceptions of the vow addition over the original narrative.

Genesis 28.10–19* represents a reception of Babylon city-theology in which Jacob calls (all of) Bethel ‘the house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’ (28.17; so again Hurowitz 2006 with further literature)⁹ and repeatedly refers to the entire area of Bethel as המקום. Conversely, the vow narrative (28.20–22*) seems to imagine the ‘house of God’ not as Bethel as a whole but as just the standing stone, which it explicitly calls בית אלהים (see recently Tröndle 2023: 120). Blum has assigned these verses to a pre-Priestly, pre-Deuteronomistic stage of the text because of the clear, non-Deuteronomistic implication of a legitimate temple at Bethel in this section (1984: 93–98; 2000: 54). P does not go as far as to use ‘temple’ terminology, but it is clear that P shares with the vow narrative the importance of the stone’s exact location vis-à-vis the entire site/settlement in 28.10–19*. The threefold emphasis on המקום אשׁר דבר אתו—the location of the standing stone—in vv. 13, 14, 15 has been interpreted as an emphatic statement that, contra Gen. 28.10–22*, the stone only serves as a memorial to God’s promise to Jacob (so Blum 1984: 269). This, however, ignores the fact that P is picking up the threefold usage of מקום from 28.11, with the second instance explicitly referring to a broader area. Conversely, P’s usage of מקום compared to Gen. 28.10–19* seems to limit the מקום, understood as the dwelling place of the deity, to a single, more-confined location at Bethel rather than the entire site. In P, the ‘stone’ marks the ‘place’ where the deity appeared. But even this is not entirely a Priestly innovation. The vow narrative also depicts not the whole site but only the stone as the deity’s ‘house’. This equation of stone and ‘place’ found in P and the vow narrative does not occur in 28.10–19*, which only tells of Jacob standing up the stone and consecrating it. Moreover, the reference to the standing stone as not just a מצבה but a ‘mere’ אבן, which scholars have interpreted as a desacralization, is not unique to P. This equation is also found in the vow narrative in v. 22, with ‘this stone’ emphasized in Jacob’s speech (והאבן הזאת אשׁר שׂמתי מצבה יהיה בית אלהים). And this text calls the מצבה both אבן and בית אלהים.

I am not trying to suggest that there is no theological reorientation of the literary Bethel sanctuary in P. It is clear that P’s Jacob/Bethel story engages in theological disagreements with texts from Gen. 28.10–22* about the location of the deity and the exact purpose of the standing stone(s) at the Bethel sanctuary. There are several aspects of the pre-P narrative in Gen. 28.10–22* that run counter to typical Priestly theology (Koch 2018: 224–225), and one would expect the author(s) of P to need to address these in some form or fashion. But if Jacob’s vow in vv. 20–22* predated P, then P’s differing conceptions of ‘place and stone’ seem to have been drawing on this later addition rather than articulating any new, polemical claims against the sanctuary. I therefore see no indication that P sought to delegitimize the entire site such as one sees in Deuteronomistic literature (e.g., 1 Kgs 12 + Exod. 32–34; 1 Kgs 13 + 2 Kgs 23). Moreover, the fact that P’s reorientations stand close to a non-Priestly text that refers to the stone as a ‘house of God’ or ‘temple’ seems to me to suggest that P stands within a literary tradition that holds the cultic place at Bethel in high regard.

There is also evidence for the fact that, if P’s goal was to make the Bethel narrative palatable for a Deuteronomistically shaped audience, this goal was not achieved particularly well. The reception of Gen. 28; 35 in Jub. 27; 31–32 attests to a later (presumably Jerusalemite) author taking umbrage with several aspects of the narrative in something akin to its current shape in the MT. The texts in Jubilees reflect several changes to their Vorlagen in Genesis that are striking in light of the present discussion, many of which relate (directly or indirectly) to how the passages use מקום:

1) ‘Truly Yhwh is in this place’ (Gen. 28.16) is removed and replaced with ‘Truly this place is the house of Yhwh’ (Jub. 27.25).¹⁰ It seems that the author struggled here with the implication of the toponym ‘Bethel’ and sought to provide an etiology for the name that was less tied to any statements about the current/immediate presence of the deity.

2) To ‘he set it up (as) a standing stone’ (Gen. 28.18) and ‘and this stone, that I have set up (as) a standing stone’ (28.22) Jubilees adds ‘as a sign [לאות]’ (Jub. 27.26–27), removing from the stone its original function as a mas.s.eba.

3) In Jubilees, Jacob further elects ‘to build this place [המקום הזה]’, to give it walls, and to ‘make it eternally holy for himself and his sons after him’ (32.16). After this, Yhwh appears to Jacob, changes his name to ‘Israel’, and ascends to heaven (vv. 16–20). Then, an angel appears, reveals seven tablets of the law to him (vv. 21–22), and forbids him from building the sanctuary: ‘Do not build this place, and do not make it an eternal sanctuary, and do not dwell here because this is not the place [כי לא זה המקום]’ (v. 22; emphasis mine). This statement seems to have been written in direct response to the Priestly text’s repeated emphasis on המקום אשׁר דבר אתו, which the author of Jubilees read in light of the Deuteronomic ‘place that Yhwh your god will choose [SamP: has chosen] from all of your tribes to put his name there’ (המקום אשׁר יבחר יהוה אלהיכם מכל שׁבטיכם לשׂום את שׁמו שׁם; Deut 12.5).¹¹

In light of these observations, it seems unlikely to me that a Jerusalemite author under Deuteronomic stipulation for a single Yahwistic sanctuary would have composed a text like Gen. 35.9–15 that can so easily be understood as implying that to Jacob, it was Bethel—and not Jerusalem—that housed ‘the’ מקום of Yhwh.¹² Therefore, despite attempts to explain the text to the contrary, the Jubilees text does not ‘represen[t] an attempt to stress the cultic importance of Bethel’ (Schwartz 1985: 73).¹³ Rather, the changes to the two Bethel narratives in Jubilees betray the author’s deep discomfort with their version of Genesis. They perceived the great importance afforded to Bethel in Genesis (including the Priestly texts) and sought to relegate Bethel to a status below that of Jerusalem (see more broadly Bergsma 2019: 295–296).¹⁴

Both Alexander Rofé (1999: 75–76; 2003: 792–793) and Philippe Guillaume (2009: 183–187) have relatively recently proposed, partially on the basis of Gen. 35.9–15, that P was composed at Bethel rather than in Jerusalem or Babylonia.¹⁵ Guillaume adopts the aforementioned delegitimization reading of Gen. 35.9–15 (P), which he understands as being rooted in an Israelite response to Persian imperial policy under Xerxes I, who according to the Satrap Stele was more restrictive in his attitudes towards local cult places than his predecessor, Darius I (Guillaume 2009: 186). Rofé, on the other hand, highlights the ‘special status’ of Bethel in Gen. 35 as well as P’s conferral of ‘perpetual priesthood’ to the descendants of Phineas in Num. 25.10–13, with Judg. 20.26–28 claiming that Phineas was a Bethelite priest and Josh. 24.33 claiming that Eleazar son of Aaron was buried in Ephraim (Rofé 1999: 75–76, here 75; 2003: 792–793; see similarly, but without a connection to P, Blenkinsopp 1998: 34–35).¹⁶

Beyond the literary evidence, both emphasize Bethel’s role as the primary cult place of Neo-Babylonian and early Persian Yehud as a major factor suggesting this setting, with Guillaume noting that the cultic site there was ‘the ideal place for the production of such a pan-Israelite compendium’, since it became ‘the repository of Benjaminite lore and of the scrolls of Jerusalem’s library after the destruction of the city’ (Guillaume 2009: 186). Both ultimately suggest that P made its way from Bethel to Jerusalem only after the latter’s reconstruction, sometime in the early fifth century BCE. In light of the implications of the literary analysis above, a discussion of historical Bethel is warranted to continue exploring this thesis.

4. Historical Bethel from the late monarchic to the early Persian period

For reasons both academic and political, historical Bethel remains quite enigmatic. Ancient Bethel has been identified as the modern Palestinian village of Beitin in the West Bank, which sits about 16 km north of Jerusalem on the way to Nablus (e.g., Albright 1968; Noth 1935; Rainey 2006; Robinson and Smith 1841: 127–130). It was excavated first by William Foxwell Albright in 1927 and 1934 and then by James Kelso, who assisted Albright in the original excavations, in 1954, 1957, and 1960 (see Albright 1934; Kelso 1955; 1958; 1961; 1968). From today’s perspective, three major problems arise from the excavations at the site that make them extremely difficult, if not entirely useless, for discussion of the biblical (cultic) site of Bethel. Firstly, the site was not published in a clear stratigraphic manner. The most recent excavations at Beitin took place around the same time as controlled stratigraphic excavations in Israel-Palestine began in earnest with Kathleen Kenyon at Tell es-Sultan/Jericho from 1954–1958. Secondly, the site lies east of the U.N. Green Line, where international archaeology has largely ceased since 1967, meaning that the site cannot be revisited in order to clarify the stratigraphic sequence. Finally, even with the stratigraphic problems, people still live in Beitin; the excavation area was therefore limited, and no temple or cultic site was ever found. Recently, Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz sought to clarify the settlement history of the site through typological analysis of the published pottery, concluding that the site saw a major decline after 587 BCE (Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz 2009). Nevertheless, because of the various difficulties, Nadav Na’aman (2011; 2014) and Oded Lipschits (2017) have correctly rebutted that the archaeological findings can say basically nothing about the history of ‘Bethel’ as an entity attested in the Hebrew Bible. And as Na’aman, Lipschits, and others (e.g., Blenkinsopp 1998; 2003; Knauf 2006; Yang 2022) have detailed, the textual evidence strongly suggests activity in Bethel in the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods (but cf. also Koenen 2003: 59–64).

This debate was initially fueled by a series of essays emphasizing Bethel’s importance, especially during the Neo-Babylonian period, in the emergence of biblical literature (e.g., Blenkinsopp 2003; Davies 2006; 2007b; Knauf 2006; see further Na’aman 2009; 2014; Yang 2022), as well as several monographs dedicated to investigating biblical Bethel and its significance for the Hebrew Bible (Davies 2007a; Gomes 2006; Koenen 2003; Köhlmoos 2006). Several of these contributions have, in some form or fashion, expressed the fundamental insight that the construction of a ‘biblical Israel’ including the populations of the former kingdoms of both Israel and Judah has its roots in a Judean association with the cultic site at Bethel, which likely became the primary cultic site of Neo-Babylonian Yehud while Jerusalem was in ruins and the provincial political centre was in Mizpah (e.g., Davies 2006: 144–145; 2007a: 158–171; 2007b: 108–111; Knauf 2006, esp. 295). And even for those who see an earlier genetic connection between ‘Israel’ and ‘Judah’, sixth-century Bethel is still seen as a key player in the composition of texts about greater ‘Israel’ (e.g., Na’aman 2009: 340–341; 2014: 118–119).

How, then, should Bethel’s exact relationship to Judah and Jerusalem be characterized during the late monarchic and Neo-Babylonian periods (for what follows, see esp. Blenkinsopp 2003: 93–101; Knauf 2006: 295–302, 305–308)? While textual evidence for Bethel during the Neo-Babylonian period is scant, it seems to be referenced in Jer. 41.4–5, since by this time, the Jerusalem temple was destroyed. Within texts set in postexilic times, Bethel appears as an active settlement in Ezra 2.28; Neh. 7.31; 11.31.

The tribal lists in Joshua place Bethel at the border between Ephraim and Benjamin (Josh. 16.1–2; 18.13, 22; also 1 Chron. 7.28). First Kings 12–13 regards Bethel as the southernmost cultic centre of the kingdom of Israel and associates it with the ‘sin of Jeroboam’ (see also 2 Kgs 10.29), while the report of the Josianic cultic reforms in 2 Kgs 23 repeatedly presupposes Josiah being able to exercise dominion over Bethel. Since Albrecht Alt (1925: 106–12), there have been arguments for a ‘conquest’ of Jericho, Bethel, and Ai by Josiah in the late seventh century in order to explain Bethel’s appearance in 2 Kgs 23 as well as Jericho and Ai’s prominence in the conquest narrative in Joshua (followed recently by Lipschits 2020: 177; Na’aman 1991: 33–60; 2009: 338–339). Others have suggested that Assyria gave Bethel to Judah sometime after the conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE as a reward for its loyalty (Davies 2007b: 103 [under Ahaz]; Knauf 2006: 295–297, 314–316 [under Manasseh]).

There is broad agreement in circles that maintain Bethel’s existence in the Neo-Babylonian period that the shift in the political centre of the southern Palestinian highlands from Jerusalem to Mizpah (Tell en-Nas.beh) following the Babylonian conquest brought with it new life for the Bethel temple (e.g., Blenkinsopp 1998: 34–39; 2003: 97–99; Knauf 2006: 305–306; Lipschits 2020: 179; Na’aman 2009: 340; hence also the ‘juxtaposition of Mizpah and Bethel in Judges 20–21’ as per Blenkinsopp 2003: 99).¹⁷ It seems to be precisely these shifts in Benjamin’s political status that have resulted in the changing attitudes concerning Benjamin (e.g., Davies 2007b: 94; Lipschits 2020: 184–187). Yet as already mentioned, this has also been taken one step further: Despite the polemics against Bethel and Benjamin across the biblical texts, a number of scholars have also identified Neo-Babylonian Mizpah/Bethel as the place of origin for the concept of a ‘biblical Israel’. In the words of Philip R. Davies:

The ‘Israel’ we are looking for, into which the Judeans incorporated themselves, is a religious rather than a political body, and the locus for this religious body is the community long served by the Bethel cult, the home of Israel itself, or rather ‘himself’: Jacob. Addressed as ‘children of Jacob’ (or rather more simply: ‘Jacob’) and venerating him as their ancestor, worshipers at Bethel were indeed ‘Israel’; and from 586 onward, this identity affected all or most of the Judeans who lived in Yehud (Davies 2006: 145; emphasis original).

Here, Davies identifies 586 BCE as the pivotal moment for the Judahite acceptance of ‘Israelite’ identity, as administrative and cultic structures were relocated northwards following the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet, as Na’aman has demonstrated (2009), locating Judah’s identification with ‘Israel’ only after the Babylonian conquest is perhaps too late and an oversimplification of a process that probably began sometime after the fall of the kingdom of Israel in the late eighth century BCE. Moreover, I am reticent to look primarily to larger geopolitical events for this Judahite assumption of Israelite identity. Jerusalem and Bethel are a mere 16 km removed from each other—one can walk from one to the other and back within a day. The two sanctuaries probably shared a quite intimate, day-to-day relationship and rivalry. The differing uses of ‘Israel’ throughout the Hebrew Bible (as investigated in Davies 2007a: 44–101) seem to me to point towards a more gradual process beginning after the Neo-Assyrian conquest and being completed only in the postexilic period.¹⁸ This follows from comparison of various Jerusalemite texts demonstrating that this acceptance of themselves within wider ‘Israel’ was a gradual process.¹⁹ While Ezekiel could speak clearly and often of Jerusalem as part of the ‘House of Israel’ in the early exilic period,²⁰ the distinction between ‘Judah’ and ‘Israel’ is clear in Deuteronomistic literature from 1 Kgs 12 to the end of 2 Kgs.²¹ Second Kings 17.34b even seems to suggest that the Deuteronomistic author of the passage—writing in the exilic or postexilic period—understood ‘the sons of Jacob’ to refer only to the inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel and not to the author themself.²²

The close connection between Jacob and Bethel is clear from even a cursory reading of Genesis, which is why so many scholars believe parts of the pre-P Jacob story to have been composed at the sanctuary. This has not been the case, however, for the Priestly stage, leading to questions both ancient and modern as to why Gen. 28 would be preserved in a literary context so committed to the exclusive worship of Yhwh in Jerusalem.²³ For over a century and a half, there has been broad agreement in biblical scholarship that P^(g) was written by a Jerusalemite hand in the sixth or early fifth centuries BCE, either in exile in Babylonia or shortly after the return to the city in the early Persian period.²⁴ The leading counterposition has sought to date P to the preexilic period,²⁵ although proponents of a later date freely admit that P contains literary traditions dating back to the Neo-Assyrian period (so, e.g., Carr 1996: 134; Gertz 2023a: 10–11).

It seems to me that most of the evidence pointing to a late exilic or early postexilic provenance is also applicable to Bethel before the demographic center of the province returned to Jerusalem sometime around the mid-fifth century BCE (see Lipschits 2020: 182–183). Overarching concepts in P such as exile and the promise of a future return and a theology boasting a strong connection to the land, which are each strong points of reference for the late exilic/early postexilic dating, would fit just as well with the situation at Bethel, if it was indeed the cultic centre of Neo-Babylonian Yehud.²⁶ In fact, if one is looking for where discourse between groups of returnees and those who remained in the land took place, the cultural epicentres of the Neo-Babylonian province—Bethel and Mizpah—would be just as natural a possibility as Jerusalem or Babylonia, perhaps even more so.²⁷ Gerhard von Rad specifically identified exilic Babylon as the likely origin of P because of its complete lack of engagement with the specifically Jerusalemite traditions found in, for example, Deuteronomistic literature concerning the Davidic dynasty or Zion theology (Von Rad 1961: 91). A Bethelite provenance would also explain this peculiarity, with P coming from 1) a sanctuary that was seen as a competitor to Jerusalem, 2) when the Davidic dynasty had been extinguished, and 3) when Jerusalem lay in ruins.²⁸ The first and third points would also explain why no mention of Jerusalem ever appears in either Priestly or pre-Priestly traditions in especially the book of Genesis, whose possible allusions to Jerusalem in Gen. 14 and 22 are of demonstrably post-Priestly provenance (see, e.g., Cargill 2019: 5–10 and Köckert 2015, respectively) and whose pre-P and P layers focus on Bethel. This becomes even more likely if Aaron was from the beginning an invention of the Priestly Writing,²⁹ given the clear Jerusalemite Deuteronomistic antagonism toward Aaron and his association in Jerusalemite texts with Bethel (see discussion in Blenkinsopp 2003: 102–105, and also Hutzli 2023: 329–335 and literature cited therein for Exod. 32 as a hostile reaction to the Priestly tabernacle account).

5. Conclusions: Bethel and the Priestly Writing

At various points during the formation of biblical literature, certain authors considered Bethel a sanctum non gratum (so its nickname ‘Beth-aven’ in Hos. 4.15; 5.8; 10.5, 8; Amos 5.5; Jer. 4.15³⁰). This is made abundantly clear in especially 2 Kgs 23, where Josiah destroys its altar and high place after the discovery of the ‘Book of the Law’ that demands a centralization of Yahwistic cult. Nevertheless (or perhaps better: Therefore), many scholars have homed in on Bethel’s cultic significance being a major impetus for the formation of ‘biblical Israel’ comprising both Israel and Judah. In the Neo-Babylonian period, northern Benjamin became the administrative and cultic centre of the province of Yehud, shifting from the heart of traditionally Judean territory to the borderland between Jerusalem and Samaria. As others have already argued, rather than a movement of Israelite refugees southward to Jerusalem after 722 BCE (e.g., Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 243–245; Kratz 2015: 110–112), it may have been Bethel’s proximity to Judah in the late monarchic period after the conquest of Samaria, the eventual destruction of Jerusalem, and the subsequent intellectual shift northward that slowly brought ‘Judah’ under the tribal framework of ‘Israel’ (so again, e.g., Blenkinsopp 2003; Davies 2006; 2007a; 2007b; Knauf 2006).

The importance of Bethel as an active participant in the production of biblical literature is, for the Pentateuch, generally associated only with certain pre-Priestly layers in its textual stratigraphy. Yet, as detailed above, there are reasons to think that this could be extended to the Priestly Writing as well. While most of the major narrative foci of Genesis and Exodus (Jacob, Joseph, and the exodus from Egypt) are regarded as primarily northern traditions,³¹ both P and its scribal forebearers in Genesis seem to merely incorporate southern traditions (namely, Abraham and Jacob/Esau³²) into works shaped largely by the north. Perhaps P’s reverence of Bethel in Genesis, combined with the absence of Jerusalem in Priestly and pre-Priestly texts, should be seen as a feature indicative of its compositional context: P’s relatively positive depiction of the מקום at Bethel could have been because, for its author(s) and unlike in the exilic prophets or Deuteronomistic literature, Bethel was the primary Yahwistic sanctuary rather than Jerusalem. In this regard, it is worth revisiting Von Rad’s remark concerning P’s compositional setting, namely, the unlikelihood of P being composed in Jerusalem in light of the absence of David and Zion traditions (Von Rad 1961: 91). If P was truly a product of the late exilic or early postexilic period, perhaps a compositional context in the cultic centre of the region during this time is worthy of greater consideration than it has thus far been afforded.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to Profs. Jan Christian Gertz, Angelika Berlejung, and Jakob Wöhrle for their feedback on earlier versions of these ideas. Nevertheless, any and all shortcomings in the present article are, of course, my own.

ORCID iD

John Will Rice

Notes

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The Place and the Stone: Reassessing the Priestly Writing’s relationship to Bethel

Abstract

Keywords

1. Introduction

2. Jacob at Bethel in Genesis 28 and 35

3. On cultic ‘places’ and standing stones

4. Historical Bethel from the late monarchic to the early Persian period

5. Conclusions: Bethel and the Priestly Writing

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iD

Notes

References