Genesis 35:6: Back at the stone, thirty years and one name later

"And Jacob came to Luz (that is, Bethel), which is in the land of Canaan, he and all the people who were with him." The verse is careful to give the place both its names, and the order is the point: Luz first, because that is what the town was called the night he slept outside it, and Bethel in the gloss, because that is what he called the spot himself. Thirty years ago he was one man with a staff, running for his life, and he woke up and said surely the LORD is in this place and I did not know it. He comes back with a household — he and all the people who were with him — and the phrase is doing work, because the people who were with him have just handed over their foreign gods and their earrings and buried them under the oak at Shechem. The road up is about twenty miles from Shechem, straight south along the spine of the hill country, climbing the whole way to nearly three thousand feet. It is the same road he came down on the way out. He is keeping a vow made at the far end of it: if I come again to my father's house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God, and this stone shall be God's house. Luz was the Canaanite town; Bethel was Jacob's name for the open ground outside it where the stone was, and over time the name he gave it took the town too. The sources put both at Beitin, nine miles north of Jerusalem — 965 of Bethel's 1066 votes — and Luz carries no separate coordinates, so it is drawn as an open ring on the same pin rather than as a place of its own. The land of Canaan is named again, four verses after God told him to go up to Bethel and dwell there. He has been back in the country since 33:18, but this is the first time he has been where he said he would be.