Genesis 35:21: One more move, under a new name, past a watchtower nobody can find

"Israel journeyed on and pitched his tent beyond the tower of Eder." The first thing the verse does is change his name. He has been Jacob for thirty-four chapters, and from the grave onward the narrator calls him Israel — the name he was given at the Jabbok and given again at Bethel eleven verses ago, used here for the first time as simply what he is called. A man who has buried the wife he worked fourteen years for moves camp, and the text quietly uses the other name. Migdal-eder means tower of the flock: a field watchtower, the kind shepherds built of dry stone to watch a herd from, standing in open grazing outside a town. Beyond it means he pitched past it, on the far side, still on the move and not yet anywhere. The atlas is genuinely unsure where it was, and this page says so rather than pretending. Eder gets 100 of its 142 votes for Khirbet es Siyar el Ghanam, a ruin a mile or two east of Bethlehem, with 22 for Khirbet el Bira and 20 for the City of David ridge in Jerusalem — a spread wide enough that the pin is drawn as a disputed identification, which is what a hundred votes means in this data. Micah 4:8 addresses a tower of the flock alongside the hill of the daughter of Zion, which is where the Jerusalem reading comes from. What happens next to this camp is the last thing the chapter records before the genealogy: Reuben sleeps with his father's concubine here, and Israel heard of it — four words, no reply, and the firstborn loses his birthright for it in the blessing fifteen chapters later. This is the last verse of the first half of his life. The next page in the chain is the death of Isaac at Mamre.