Genesis 37:14: A fifty-mile errand, and the last ordinary sentence in Jacob's life
Read it →"So he said to him, 'Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word.' So he sent him from the Valley of Hebron, and he came to Shechem." This is the only verse in the second half of Genesis that says where Jacob is living while the rest of the book happens somewhere else. The Valley of Hebron — the broad wadi under the ridge his grandfather pitched on, with the cave of Machpelah in it — and from there a seventeen-year-old is sent fifty miles north on foot to find his brothers. See if it is well with your brothers. The Hebrew is shalom: go and see the shalom of your brothers. It is the wrong word to use about these particular brothers and the narrator knows it, because four verses earlier he has told us they could not speak peaceably to him. The father says go and see if they are at peace, and sends the boy in the coat, alone, three days' walk from help. Shechem is an odd place for the flock to be. It is fifty miles from home, and it is where two of these same brothers took swords through a city after their sister was raped, and where the household had to leave in a hurry with a terror of God on the towns around them. Grazing a flock there a few years on is either brazen or necessary; either way it explains why Jacob wants word. The distance is the whole map. Genesis gives it in one clause and the ground gives it in three days: out of the valley at Hebron, up over the watershed past Jerusalem, along the ridge road through Bethel — where his father slept on a stone going the other way — and down into the bowl between Ebal and Gerizim. It is the same road Jacob walked south on when he came home from Paddan-aram, walked north by his son, and it is the last time anybody in this family takes it without a funeral or a famine attached. He does not find them at Shechem. That is the next verse but one, and it is how the fifty miles becomes sixty-five.
Regions on this map
The broad wadi under the ridge, with the cave of Machpelah in it, and the only verse in the rest of Genesis that says where Jacob is living. It is named here and nowhere else in scripture.
The valley under the Hebron ridge, anchored by the sources on the old mound at Tel Rumeida. Abraham pitched by the oaks above it, Sarah died in the town, and the cave Ephron sold is in it. The phrase occurs once in the Bible, here, which makes this the one sentence that fixes where Jacob's household is for the whole of the Joseph story.
Today: the valley under Tel Rumeida, Hebron (representative point)
Go and see the shalom of your brothers — said about brothers who, four verses earlier, could not speak peaceably to him. Fifty miles, three days, one boy, and the coat.
In the saddle between Ebal and Gerizim, on the crossroads of the north–south ridge road and the route down to the Jordan. Its 500 votes all go to Tell Balatah. Jacob camped outside it coming home from Paddan-aram and bought the field he camped on; Simeon and Levi emptied it with swords; and the flock is grazing there now, fifty miles from Hebron, which is why a father wants word.
Today: Tell Balatah, by Nablus
Genesis 37:14 in full
- Genesis 37:14So he said to him, “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring me word.” So he sent him from the , and he came to .