This page was originally written in June 2017.
Bethel was a site in Canaan with religious significance. Here’s the Bible’s story of how Bethel got its name.
Jacob arrived at a certain place and stayed the night there, because the sun had set, and took of the stones of that place and set one near his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed and saw a ladder set on the earth, with its top in the sky, and he saw the angels of God going up and down on it.
At the top of it stood Yahweh, and he said, “I am Yahweh, the god of your father Abraham, the god of Isaac. I will give this land where you are lying to you and your descendants. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out west, east, north, and south. All the clans of the earth will bless themselves by you and your descendants. Know that I am with you, and I will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land, because I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Jacob woke up from his sleep, and said, “Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I did not realize it!”
And he was afraid, and said, “What a terrifying place! This must be the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Jacob got up at daybreak and took the stone which he had placed near his head, and set it up as an obelisk, and poured oil on top of it.
He called the name of that place Beth El, but the city was called Luz at first.
And here’s the story of how Bethel got its name, according to the Bible.
God appeared to Jacob again, when he left Padan-aram, and blessed him. And God said to him, “Your name is Jacob, but you will not be called Jacob any more. Rather, Israel will be your name.” And he called his name Israel.
And God said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Be fertile and multiply. A nation, a whole host of nations, will come from you. Kings will come from your loins. And the land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give to you and to your descendants after you.” Then God ascended above him in the place where he had spoken with him.
And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he spoke with him, a pillar of stone, and poured a drink-offering on it, and poured oil onto it.
And Jacob called the name of the place where God spoke to him Beth El.
The stories have some features in common: Jacob is the protagonist. He sees God, and God, after first saying, “I am [name],” delivers a reassuring promise about how Jacob’s descendants will become numerous and inhabit the promised land. In response, Jacob sets up a pillar of stone, pours oil on the stone, and names the place Beth El (house of God).
There are also differences. The first example is more detailed, and discusses how Jacob chose a stone, while the second story simply has Jacob choosing a stone without further details.
But the most important difference of all is in what the two stories call their god. Both the words of the narrator(s) and the words of Jacob and God show this difference. In the first story, the narrator tells us that Yahweh stands atop a ladder, and then Yahweh says, “I am Yahweh.” Jacob thinks to himself, “Yahweh must be here.”
In the second story, we read that God (Elohim) appears, calling himself El Shaddai.
What gives?
It may help to know that this kind of repetition of stories, while interesting, is by no means unique. In fact, the Pentateuch is swarming with them. A story is told in two different versions, with significant overlap but substantial differences, and the two stories use different names for the deity. This happens with the creation, Adam’s descendants, the flood, the wife-sister stories of Genesis, the prophecy of Isaac’s birth, and plenty more. In the trade jargon of biblical studies, these sorts of pairs are called doublets.
For a hint as to how such a phenomenon of doublets might appear, consider Psalms 14 and 53. They’re almost exactly the same Psalm, only that one calls God Elohim throughout and one calls him Yahweh. So at some point, there was an original Psalm — I won’t hazard a guess as to what it called God. Then someone, who preferred for some reason to have the Psalm use the other term, made a copy and systematically changed the name. Presumably, the two versions continued to exist (in different Psalm collections?) until someone compiled the book of Psalms. Our compiler (or we could use the biblical-studies jargon term redactor) came along and made a collection of Psalms which included both versions.
The Documentary Hypothesis
It looks like something similar happened, although on a much more extensive scale, in the compilation of the Pentateuch. For a large number of stories (see here for a list of 28 of them), versions existed which used systematically different names for God. Our redactor uses these multiple sources to create the Pentateuch, weaving these various strands together into a larger work.
There are a host of more or less specific hypotheses about how this happened. The simplest thing we could say is that multiple sources, using different names for God, were combined in such a way as to leave extensive doublets all over the place. A more specific, and riskier, interpretation would hold that we can carefully analyze the text of the Pentateuch and reconstruct in great detail the exact content and number of sources used.
The “classic” form of the documentary hypothesis is what the JEDP theory, produced by Wellhausen and refined by others. This has more recently fallen on hard times, as a variety of alternate approaches and questions have arisen. But what remains clear is that some kind of redaction process combined alternate versions into the Pentateuch. What is not as clear is just how well we can reconstruct the process, because none of the original sources have survived. All we have is the final product.
The biblical authors did not appear to have concerns about what we would today label, pejoratively, as “plagiarism.” Writers of ancient “history”, before Herodotus, tended to combine their source material freely without explaining what came from where. It was only later that people started adding footnotes and quotation marks to identify authors. The Pentateuch does no such thing — it is an anonymous document. It does not work in terms of modern concerns about authorship.
The average reader simply picks up her Bible and reads, without trying to work out a theory of authorship. In many cases, modern readers have been told that Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy, and they assume that he “wrote” it in the modern sense of the term: that he wrote the entire thing himself.
But if the Pentateuch is the work of a single author who created the whole thing as a single work, there is no good explanation for where dozens of doublets would come from. The doublets are a tell-tale mark of a particular sort of editorial process, a process which produces large and small inconsistencies in the finished work.
In this case, the final version of Genesis has two different stories to explain the presence of a sacred stone and the cultic site at Bethel. Where they stand now, the two stories are separated in the Genesis timeline by twenty years — the first story occurs as Jacob goes down to Padan-aram to be with Laban. Laban employs Jacob twenty years, after which Jacob leaves Padan-aram and names Bethel again, under suspiciously similar circumstances.
In Addition
As an illustration of just how pervasive these doublets are, consider this. This post has been simply comparing the Bethel narratives: one version in Genesis 28, the other in Genesis 35. But if you’re very familiar with Genesis, you may have noticed the presence of another doublet. The Genesis 35 version of Bethel’s naming includes this tidbit, not found in 28:
“Your name is Jacob, but you will not be called Jacob any more. Rather, Israel will be your name.” And he called his name Israel.
That is in fact part of another doublet. In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles a mysterious stranger, whom Jacob identifies as God. At the close of this wrestling story, the stranger says,
You will no longer be called Jacob. Rather, you will be called Israel, because you have wrestled with God and men, and won.
So the story in 35 is not just the second narrative of how Bethel got its name and its pillar. It is also the second narrative of how Israel got his name.