Genesis 35:7: He names it again, and this time after the God and not the house

"And there he built an altar and called the place El-bethel, because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother." The first time he was here he called it Bethel, house of God. Now he calls it El-bethel, the God of the house of God, and the difference is the thirty years. A frightened man names the place; a man who has been carried through Haran and Laban and the night at the Jabbok names the one who was in it. The house is no longer the point. It is also the first altar he has built at Bethel. In 28 he set up the stone he had slept on, poured oil over it and made a vow; there was no altar, because there was nothing yet to give thanks for. The altar is the vow discharged. The verse says God had revealed himself — plural in the Hebrew, oddly, the verb agreeing as if with the God of the house rather than with one act — and dates it: when he fled from his brother. That is the one line of autobiography in the sentence and it puts the two visits side by side. He came here running from Esau; he has come back having met Esau and survived it. El-bethel has 500 votes in the sources and exactly Bethel's coordinates. It is the altar's name, not a settlement — a spot on ground already drawn — so the map rings it on Bethel's pin rather than pretending to a second site. The frame is the tightest in the series, half a mile across, because there is nothing here to travel: one man, one heap of stones, and a name said out loud.