Genesis 33:17

Jacob has spent two decades in Padanaram, working for Laban and raising a family (Genesis 29–31). God told him to go home, and he set out with a large household and great flocks. Two meetings stood between him and Canaan. At Peniel he wrestled through the night and received the name Israel (Genesis 32:22–32), and the next day he met the brother he had wronged and found peace where he had feared revenge (Genesis 33:1–16).

The four verses that follow are the quiet after those two meetings. Jacob rests, arrives, buys and worships. Behind each step stands the promise God made him at Bethel on his way out of the land: “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land” (Genesis 28:15). On the eve of meeting Esau, Jacob had held God to that word in prayer (Genesis 32:9–12). Here the answer is written out in place names.

Succoth lay east of the Jordan, in the fertile valley of the river, where there was good pasture for flocks. Jacob’s company had just come through the hardest days of the journey, and it included many children and a great number of animals. A place with grass, water and safety, where everyone could recover before going on into the more settled country around Shechem, was a sensible place to halt. Genesis gives no reason beyond what Jacob did there, so this is the likely one.

The verb “journeyed”, nâçaʻ, means to pull up, as one pulls up tent pegs, and so to set out. Jacob breaks camp once more, and this time the next thing he does is build.

Verse 18 is the arrival. It names four places, Shalem, Shechem, Canaan and Padanaram, and together they measure the whole journey: from the far country where he served Laban to the land God swore to Abraham and his seed “for an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8). The phrase “when he came from Padanaram” closes a chapter of his life that held twenty years of labour, marriage, children and hard dealings.

The verse calls him Jacob, Yaʻăqôb, the name given at his birth, which means “heel-catcher” or “supplanter”. He had fled this land as exactly that, with a brother who wanted to kill him. He comes back at peace with Esau and openly, in daylight, to a city gate.

Shechem was an old and important city, set in a fertile valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. It was also the first place Abraham stopped when he entered Canaan. There the LORD appeared to him and said, “Unto thy seed will I give this land”, and there Abraham built his first altar in the land (Genesis 12:6–7). Jacob, his grandson, now stands on the same ground with the same promise.

The next step is new. Jacob “bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent”. The verb qânâh means to acquire or buy, and so to own. A chelqâh is an allotment, a marked-out portion of ground. He was already camped on this plot, and now he pays for it, so that the ground under his tent becomes his own property in the land of promise.

The sellers were “the children of Hamor, Shechem’s father”. Hamor was the chief of the Hivites who lived around Shechem, and “at the hand of”, yâd, means the deal was made directly with them. Jacob paid the recognised owners and took nothing by force. The whole land was promised to his descendants, and at this stage he receives a piece of it the honest way, by agreement and for a fair price.

On his own ground Jacob “erected there an altar”. The verb nâtsab means to station or set up. An altar, mizbêach, is a place of sacrifice, and the word comes from a root meaning “to sacrifice”. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob each built altars at the turning points of their lives: where God had appeared, where a promise was given, or where a journey ended. At an altar they sacrificed, prayed and remembered what God had done.

Then Jacob named it. Elelohe-Israel, ʼÊl ʼĕlôhêy Yisrâʼêl, means “God, the God of Israel”. ʼÊl is a word for God that speaks of his power. ʼĕlôhêy is the form of the usual word for God that means “God of”. And Israel is the name Jacob was given at Peniel, which means “he struggles with God” or “prince with God”.

So the name of the altar is a confession. At Bethel, twenty years before, Jacob had vowed that if God brought him home in peace, “then shall the LORD be my God”. He is home in peace, and he says so in stone. He uses his new name, taking as his own what God had made him, and he calls God by that name: the God who met him, kept him and changed him is his God. In a land full of other altars, where the Canaanites worshipped other gods, this one says publicly whom Jacob serves. Moses later did the same after a victory, building an altar and giving it a name (Exodus 17:15).

The name also reaches forward. “The God of Israel” would be the confession of a whole nation, and it was at Shechem that Joshua gathered the tribes, made a covenant with them and set up a great stone as a witness that they would serve the LORD (Joshua 24:25–27).

Each of the four pictures here is taken up again in Christ.

Jacob made booths, temporary shelters on the way. John says of Jesus, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14): in him God came to live among his people. Our lives, like Jacob’s, are lived in tents, and we look as Abraham did for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:9–10). Until then God himself is our shelter, “our refuge and strength” (Psalm 46:1), and at the end “the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:1–4).

Jacob came in peace to Shalem after being reconciled to his brother. God has reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18–19), “for he is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14). Jesus calls the weary and heavy laden to himself and promises them rest (Matthew 11:28), the rest that Jacob’s homecoming only pictured.

Jacob bought a field with a hundred pieces of money. Christ bought a people, and the price was “the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19). In him we have redemption through his blood and the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:13–14), and the Holy Spirit is given as the pledge of our inheritance until we come into it fully (Ephesians 1:13–14).

Jacob built an altar under a new name. Anyone who is in Christ is “a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed and heirs of the promise (Galatians 3:29). Hebrews says, “We have an altar” (Hebrews 13:10), and the sacrifice offered for us is Christ’s own. Through him we have peace with God and access into his grace (Romans 5:1–2), and we are built up as a holy priesthood “to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5).

These verses show a God who finishes what he says. Twenty years lay between the promise at Bethel and the tent in front of Shechem, years that held Laban’s cheating, a night of wrestling and a frightening walk toward Esau. Through all of it God was bringing Jacob home, and he did it for a man with a crooked past whose own name meant supplanter. His faithfulness rested on his word, and Jacob’s record did nothing to earn it.

The passage also gives a place to rest. Succoth was a pause between the struggle and the next stage of the road, and Scripture records it with the same care as the wrestling. Seasons of recovering, building and looking after the people and things in our charge belong to a life lived with God. “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1), and Jacob’s house at Succoth stood because the LORD had kept him that far.

And it shows what gratitude looks like when it takes a form. Jacob put down money for a field because he trusted the promise, and he raised an altar because he knew who had brought him there. He named God as his own God, in public, on ground others could see. Those who have been brought through something by the same God have the same thing to say: he is God, and he is our God.