Jacob's life

Genesis 25:26–50:14

Born holding his brother's heel and carried back, a hundred and forty-seven years later, to be buried in his grandfather's cave. Between the two: a stone for a pillow at Bethel, twenty years in Haran for a father-in-law who changed his wages ten times, a night at the ford of the Jabbok, Shechem and Bethel again, Rachel's grave on the road to Ephrath, and at the end the wagons down to Goshen — the journey out of the land that the whole of Exodus exists to reverse.

The flight, and the ladder at Bethel

Genesis 28:10–22

He leaves Beersheba with a staff and walks north. Where he stops is only “a certain place” until morning, when he sets the stone he slept on upright and pours oil on it: Bethel, though the town was Luz first. Everything he promises here he comes back and pays twenty years later.

Haran, Laban, and the twenty years

Genesis 29:1–31:16

The land of the people of the east, a well with a stone over its mouth, and Rachel coming to it. Almost nothing in these three chapters moves on the ground: two weddings, eleven sons and a daughter, three days' journey set between his flock and Laban's, and wages changed ten times — until the word comes to go home.

Genesis 29:1The only geography in three chapters, and it is deliberately vague

The flight from Laban, and the heap in Gilead

Genesis 31:17–55

Wives and children on camels, the Euphrates crossed, and his face set toward the hill country of Gilead. Laban takes three days to hear of it and seven to catch him, searches the tents and finds nothing, and the two of them pile stones instead — a heap with a name in each of their languages, and a border neither is to cross again.

Mahanaim, Peniel, and meeting Esau

Genesis 32:1–33:17

Messengers sent ahead into Seir come back saying four hundred men are on the way, so he splits everything into two camps at the place he has just named for two camps. That night he sends them over the ford of the Jabbok and stays behind alone, and crosses at sunrise limping. Esau turns back south to Seir; Jacob turns aside to Succoth and builds a house and booths for his cattle.

Shechem, and back to Bethel

Genesis 33:18–35:15

He comes safely to Shechem and buys the field he is camped in — the second piece of ground the family owns — and then Dinah, and two of his sons with swords, make the place impossible to stay in. The foreign gods go under the terebinth, and he goes up at last to build the altar he vowed at Bethel, burying Rebekah's nurse under an oak below it.

Ephrath, Migdal Eder, and home to Mamre

Genesis 35:16–27

They journey on from Bethel and Rachel goes into labour with the road still to run, and is buried where she dies, on the way to Ephrath — a grave with a pillar on it that is still being pointed at when the chapter is written. Israel pitches beyond the tower of Eder, the twelve are counted, and the last stage of the road brings him to his father at Mamre — Kiriath-arba, that is Hebron — twenty years after he walked out of the land.

Esau's country, and Joseph sold

Genesis 36–37

The brothers separate for good, and for the same reason Abram and Lot did: the land cannot carry both households. Esau takes his to the hill country of Seir and becomes Edom, chief by chief and king by king; Jacob stays in the land of his father's sojournings, and sends Joseph out of the Valley of Hebron to Shechem, then to Dothan, where a caravan carrying gum and balm down to Egypt takes him off the map for twenty-two years.

The journeys for grain

Genesis 42–45

The famine reaches Canaan and he sends ten sons down to Egypt for food, keeping the youngest at home. They come back, eat it, and go down a second time with Benjamin — and come up out of Egypt with wagons, and word that the son he has mourned for twenty years is governing the country. Two round trips of two hundred and fifty miles, and he makes neither of them.

Down to Egypt

Genesis 46:1–47:12

He goes as far as Beersheba and stops to sacrifice, at the well his father dug and his grandfather swore at: it is the last place in the land he sees, and where he is told not to be afraid to leave it. Seventy people, in Pharaoh's own wagons, with Judah sent ahead to show the way into Goshen and Joseph's chariot coming up to meet them.

The blessing, the death, and the burial at Machpelah

Genesis 47:28–50:14

Seventeen years in Egypt, and then the oath: do not bury me here. He blesses Joseph's two sons with his hands crossed, names the cave at Machpelah where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Leah already lie, and dies. Egypt mourns him seventy days, and the whole court of Pharaoh goes up with the family to bury him — by a road that halts east of the Jordan, at a threshing floor the Canaanites rename Abel-mizraim for the size of the mourning on it.

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