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Genesis 35:8: The oak of weeping, and the only word anyone gets about his mother

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Genesis 35:7ESV

and there he built an altar and called the place , because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother.

Genesis 35:8ESV

And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below . So he called its name .

Genesis 35:16ESV

Then they journeyed from . When they were still some distance from , Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor.

Genesis 35:7
Genesis 35:16

"And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel. So he called its name Allon-bacuth." A verse that stops the chapter to bury a servant. Deborah is named once before, unnamed, in Genesis 24:59 — Rebekah's nurse went with her when the caravan took her south to marry Isaac, sixty years before Jacob was born. She has been in the family the whole time. Nobody has mentioned her since, and now she dies old in Jacob's camp at Bethel and gets a tree with a name on it. How she came to be with Jacob rather than at Hebron is the question the text will not answer, and there is only one obvious road to it: he had come back from Haran and gone looking for his mother, and this is who was left. Rebekah's death is never reported anywhere in Genesis. The nearest the book comes to grieving her is this tree, and the name is Allon-bacuth, the oak of weeping — more weeping than a nurse would normally account for. Below Bethel puts it on the slope south or east of the town, on ground already drawn. The sources give the name 500 votes and Bethel's own coordinates, marked as a centre rather than a settlement, which is the honest position: it is a tree somewhere in sight of a town, and no atlas claims to know which tree. The map rings it on Bethel's pin. The colour is the green this series gives graves. Sarah is under it at Machpelah, and Rachel will be under it eleven verses from here.

Map of Genesis 35:8: The oak of weeping, and the only word anyone gets about his mother — 1 sites plotted
1 sites from Genesis 35:8 on one frame. The map at the top of the page is the same drawing, and it walks the verses with you.

Regions on this map

The oak of weeping. A nurse who came south with Rebekah sixty years before Jacob was born, dying in his camp — and the closest thing Genesis gives his mother to a funeral.

  • Oak of weeping. 500 votes, Bethel's own coordinates, and filed as a centre rather than a site — the sources are locating a tree by the town it stood below, which is as far as the evidence goes. The name occurs once in the Bible, here.

  • Beitin, 965 of 1066 votes. The oak is below it — on the slope, outside the town, which is where this family has always buried people.

    Today: Beitin, West Bank

Genesis 35:8 in full

  1. Genesis 35:8And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below . So he called its name .