Genesis 31:23: The only chase in the book that catches up

"he took his kinsmen with him and pursued him for seven days and followed close after him into the hill country of Gilead." Seven days is the measurement the verse exists for. Laban hears on the third day that Jacob has gone, raises his kinsmen, and rides; a man on his own moving light gains on a column of flocks and children by about twenty miles a day, and it takes him a week of that to close the gap. Which is a way of saying how far ahead Jacob had got — roughly a fortnight's march, three hundred miles, the length of Syria — before anyone came after him. It is also the only pursuit in Genesis that arrives. Abraham's chase after the four kings runs to Dan and beyond Damascus and the text never says he caught them at a place; the brothers' steward overtakes Benjamin outside the city; here Laban comes up to a camp already pitched in the hills, with his own daughters in it, and has nothing prepared to say. God meets him in a dream the night before and tells him to say nothing, good or bad, and the speech he makes the next morning is a man who has been told not to do the thing he rode a week to do. Gilead is drawn as country rather than as a dot. The highland east of the Jordan is real, wooded, and about forty miles deep; the single representative point the sources file for the name is a mound above the Jabbok that two other places in this chapter's neighbourhood are argued over. So the frame holds the hills and the ring sits where the record does, and the route comes down into them from off the top of the map, which is where Laban is coming from. What is settled here is not the argument but the border. Two verses on from the search of the tents, the pile of stones goes up.