hat which runs
towards the north, though Shechem itself is more than a mile distant. We
should notice that S. John does not say that the well was actually in
"the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph," only that it
was "near to" the patriarch's field.

If Jacob came to Shechem in peace, the peace was of no long continuance.
Simeon and Levi, the sons of the patriarch, avenged the insult offered
by the Shechemite prince to their sister Dinah, by treacherously falling
upon the city and slaying "all the males." Jacob was forced to fly,
leaving behind him the altar he had erected. He made for the Canaanitish
city of Luz, the Beth-el of later days, where he had seen the great
altar-stairs sloping upward to heaven. The idols that had been carried
from Mesopotamia were buried "under the oak which was by Shechem," along
with the ear-rings of the women. The oak was one of those sacred trees
which abounded in the Semitic world, like another oak at Beth-el,
beneath which the nurse of Rebekah was soon afterwards to be buried.

At Beth-el Jacob built another altar. But he could not rest there, and
once more took his way to the south. On the road his wife Rachel died
while giving birth to his youngest son, and her tomb beside the path to
Beth-lehem was marked by a "pillar" which the writer of the Book of
Genesis tells us remained to his own day. It indicated the boundary
between the territories of Benjamin and Judah at Zelzah (1 Sam. x. 2).

At Beth-lehem Jacob lingered a long while. His flocks and herds were
spread over the country, under the charge of his sons, browsing on the
hills and watered at the springs, for which the "hill-country of Judah"
was famous. In their search for pasturage they wandered northward, we
are told, "beyond the tower of the Flock," which guarded the Jebusite
stronghold of Zion (Mic. iv. 8). Beth-lehem itself was more commonly
known in that age by the name of Ephrath. Beth-lehem, "the temple of
Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived
from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right
in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort
Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.

At Beth-lehem Jacob was but a few miles distant from Hebron, where Isaac
still lived, and where at his death he was buried by his sons Jacob and
Esau in the family tomb of Machpelah. It was the last time, seemingly,
that the two bro