*This post was originally written in June 2017, and revised in July 2022.
And Jacob came shalem ʕir shekhem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Padan-aram, and encamped in front of the city.
Because Hebrew doesn’t have capitalization to distinguish proper nouns from other words, we are left to make a judgment call as to whether shalem is a proper noun or just a regular word. If it is a proper noun, then we read,
And Jacob came to Shalem, a city of Shechem, . . . or else, And Jacob came to Shalem, the city of Shechem . . . .
In that case we would probably equate this Shalem with the Shalem were Melchizedek was king. In English Bibles, the Shalem that Melchizedek ruled is generally called Salem in English, but in Hebrew it’s Shalem. I’m generally fine with translations rendering some name in a way that departs a bit from the Hebrew, but if they do it they should do it consistently. The KJV makes the mistake of calling Melchizedek’s city Salem but the city in Genesis 33:18 Shalem, when they are in fact spelled the same way in Hebrew.
Now, this reading would make Shalem either identical or close to Shechem, in the north. This would appear to contrast with Psalm 76:2, which identifies Salem with Jerusalem, a southern city. There’s a couple ways to deal with that. You could consider Psalm 76:2 a later document, which mistakenly takes the Shalem of Genesis 14:8 as being Jerusalem, or you could say that there are two Shalems in the Bible. There are, after all, two Mount Hors.
Of course this is all assuming that there even is a city named Shalem in Genesis 33:18. If we instead take shalem as just a regular old word, we read it as “safely”:
And Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Padan-aram, and encamped in front of the city.
The interpretation 'safely' is the one found in the ASV, JPS 1917, NIV, NLT, ESV, NKJV, NASB, CSB, NET, WEB, and NHEB. It seems to be only older translations -- at least of the selection visible at biblehub.com, which interpret Shalem as a place name.