Genesis 33:18: The whole road home closed in one word, and a camp outside the walls

"And Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, on his way from Paddan-aram, and he camped before the city." The word is shalem, and translators have argued over it for centuries: safe, whole, at peace, in one piece — or a place name, Salem, a town near Shechem. Every reading says roughly the same thing about the map. The road that began at 28:10 with a man leaving Beersheba alone ends here with a household, a herd and a limp, and one adverb carries the twenty years. Three names in one sentence give the page its frame. Paddan-aram at the top, six hundred miles away, where he was; Canaan, which is the country he vowed at Bethel to come back to; and Shechem, which is the first town in it his grandfather stopped at. Abraham came into the land here, at the oak of Moreh, and was told this is the land I will give your offspring, and built an altar. Jacob is the second man to arrive in Canaan and the second to arrive at this spot. He camps before the city rather than in it, which is what the family always does and is not a detail: they buy ground, pitch on it and stay outside. The next verse is the purchase of the field he is camped on, and 33:20 is an altar on it with a name of its own — God, the God of Israel — the first time he uses the name he was given at the Jabbok. Shechem is a real and well-fixed place, Tell Balata below Mount Gerizim, in the pass between Ebal and Gerizim where the north–south ridge road crosses the east–west one. What happens there in the next chapter drives him out of it, and the field is the one piece of the country his family still holds at the end of the Bible: Joseph's bones are buried in it in Joshua 24.