Genesis 28:10: Both ends of the longest walk in the book, in one sentence

"Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran." Eight words, and about five hundred miles inside them. Beersheba is the well at the top of the Negev where his grandfather swore an oath and his father built the one altar of his life; Haran is a caravan town on the upper Balikh in what is now south-eastern Turkey, and between them lies the whole length of Canaan, the Syrian coast road, the Orontes valley and the plain below the Euphrates. Six or seven weeks of walking for a man on his own. He is on his own. Rebekah's plan at 27:43 was a flight; Isaac's blessing at 28:5 made it an errand, a son sent to his mother's people for a wife. This verse is the errand actually beginning, and the text gives him nothing to begin it with — no servants, no camels, no ten men and ten camels loaded with the best of his master's goods, which is exactly what Abraham's servant took up this same road a generation earlier to fetch Jacob's mother. At 32:10 he says what he had: "with only my staff I crossed this Jordan". The road is the oldest one in the story. Terah came down it out of Haran's country; Abraham walked out of Haran at seventy-five and never went back; the servant went up it for Rebekah and came down it with her. Jacob is the fourth generation on the same route and the first to walk it alone. The map draws the first day of it solid and the rest as a course. He gets as far as the ridge above the Benjamin plateau before the sun sets — the next verse has him lying down there with a stone under his head, and the verse after that gives the place a name. Everything north of that line is where he is going, not where he has been.