Genesis 28:5: The same road, walked for a reason nobody says out loud

"Thus Isaac sent Jacob away. And he went to Paddan-aram, to Laban, the son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob's and Esau's mother." The road Rebekah named in a whisper is now an order from his father, and it is given for an entirely different reason. She wanted Jacob out of his brother's reach. Isaac tells him to go and find a wife — do not take a wife from the Canaanite women — and sends him off with the blessing of Abraham said over him properly, in daylight, to the right son. Rebekah engineered that too. The verse before Isaac calls Jacob in, she goes to her husband and says she is weary of her life because of the Hittite women Esau has married, and that if Jacob takes one of them she has nothing to live for. It is true and it is also the pretext, and she never mentions the death threat. The son leaves with a blessing instead of as a fugitive, and the man who blessed him does not know he is saving his life. Paddan-aram is the same country as Haran by another name — the field or plain of Aram, the region round the town, which is why 491 of its votes sit on Harran itself and the rest are scattered. It is Genesis's term for where the family's wives come from: Rebekah was fetched from here, Leah and Rachel will be, and the phrase attaches to the story eleven times and never leaves it. So the line on this map is the line Genesis 27:43 drew as a course, drawn again as a walk. Jacob leaves Beersheba, sleeps the first night at a place he will call Bethel, and does not see this country again for twenty years.