Genesis 35:16: On the road, with no town in reach, and Rachel goes into labour

"Then they journeyed from Bethel. When they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor." The verse is built out of a measurement nobody can convert. Kivrat ha-aretz — some distance, a stretch of ground, a length of land — appears three times in the Bible and no one knows what it meant. What it means here is plain enough: not far enough. They are between towns. There is no roof, no midwife of the household's own, no way to go back and no way to hurry forward, and the hardest birth in Genesis happens on the open road. The road is the ridge road south, the same one he came up on. Bethel is at nearly three thousand feet; Ephrath — Bethlehem — is fifteen miles south of it past Jerusalem, and the map draws the leg as far as the wording will carry it and stops, because the text stops. He never arrives at Ephrath in this verse. He gets there at 35:19 to bury her. Benjamin is the son being born, the twelfth and the only one born in the land. Rachel names him Ben-oni, son of my sorrow, with her last breath and Jacob changes it to Benjamin, son of the right hand, which is one of the tenderest corrections in the book: he will not have the boy carry it. She had asked for this. Give me children, or I shall die, she said at 30:1, and Jacob's anger flared at her for saying it. The second son she prayed for is the one that kills her.