Genesis 33:17: Four miles the other way, and the first house he has ever built

"But Jacob journeyed to Succoth, and built himself a house and made booths for his livestock. Therefore the name of the place is called Succoth." The verse begins with a but, and the but is the map. Esau has gone south; Jacob goes west, down out of the hills into the Jordan valley, about four miles from where he spent the night at Peniel. He had said he would follow his brother to Seir. He stops instead at the first flat ground with water on it and does something he has not done in ninety-seven years of life: he builds. A house, not a tent. It is the only building anyone in the three patriarchal generations puts up for themselves — Abraham pitches, Isaac pitches, Jacob has pitched from Bethel to Haran and back — and the text notices it. The booths are for the cattle, brushwood shelters thrown up for a herd that has just walked six hundred miles, and the place keeps their name. Succoth means booths. That is the tell-tale of how long he stayed. Nobody roofs a house for a season. The chronology of the next chapter needs years here — Dinah is a child at 30:21 and old enough for Shechem's story by 34 — and this verse is where those years go, in a sentence that sounds like a stopover. The site is well attested: 648 of its 752 votes put Succoth at Tell Deir Alla on the north bank of the Jabbok where it comes out into the Jordan valley, with 104 for Tell el-Ekhsas a mile and a half west. It is the same name as the first stop out of Egypt in Exodus 12:37, and a different place; Gideon threatens this one in Judges 8 for refusing his men bread.