Jacob awoke
from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is present in this place, and I
did not know it!" Shaken, he said, "How awesome is this place! This
is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven."
Early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and
set it up as a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He named that site
Bethel; but previously the name of the city had been Luz. (Gen 28:16-19 | 1985
JPS Tanakh)
I am the
God of Beth-el, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to Me.
Now, arise and leave this land and return to your native land.'" (Gen
31:13 | 1985 JPS Tanakh)
And Jacob
set up a pillar at the site where He had spoken to him, a pillar of stone, and
he offered a libation on it and poured oil upon it. (Gen 35:14 | 1985 JPS
Tanakh)
Commenting on anointing a rock with oil, Benjamin
Sommer noted that:
Jacob’s decision
to pour oil on top of a rock was neither random nor unique. It calls a
Northwest Semitic ritual associated with sacred stelae. This ritual is attested
in texts that describe how to install a high priestess in the temple of Baal
Hadad in Emar. (The text describing the ritual is in Akkadian, but the rituals
reflect the Northwest Semitic culture of Emar, in which the Canaanite/Aramean
god Baal Hadad was worshipped.) During the fourth day of the ceremonies, we are
told “the high priestess shall pour find oil over the tip of the stele (sikkānu)
of ḫebet.” (The goddess of ḫebet is the consort of Hadad in these
texts.) The same type of fine oil had just been used to anoint the high
priestess herself. The oil rendered this woman the new high priestess, just as
oil was poured over Yhwh’s new high priest or a new king according to the
biblical texts. The fine oil may similarly have had a transformative role when it
was poured on the stele, especially because this sort of oil was otherwise
rarely used in the installation festival. The anointing may have been intended
to renew or fortify the goddess’s presence during the installation of her
spouse’s high priest. At the very least, the parallel between the anointing of
a stele in the two texts demonstrates that Jacob’s action need to be understood
in a larger context of biblical and ancient Near Eastern evidence, all of which
begins to suggest a parallel with the Mesopotamian mīs pî rituals.
The
possibility that Jacob rendered an inert rock into an animate betyl is
strengthened by Genesis 31.13. There God appeared to Jacob and said אָנֹכִ֤י הָאֵל֙
בֵּֽית־אֵ֔ל אֲשֶׁ֙ר מָשַׁ֤חְתָּ שָּׁם֙ מַצֵּבָ֔ה. We might translate this
verse, “I am the God in the betyl that you anointed into a stele there.” In
this case, the presence of God in the betyl is made explicit, and the verb משׁח takes
a double accusative to indicate its transformative nature. Alternatively, we
might render it, “I am the God Bethel whom you anointed there in the stele.”
The God who became incarnate in the betyl takes the divine name Bethel because
He is identical with the cult stele known by that name. Here again, the
presence of God in the object is stressed. To be sure, the evidence is not
clear cut. One might prefer reading בית א-ל in all these texts as a place name
rather than as “betyl”; indeed, Genesis 28.19 and 35.6 identify this place with
the city of Luz, also known as Bethel, home of one of the northern kingdom’s
major temples. But this third possibility does not contradict the first two.
Luz came to be known as Bethel precisely because of the betyl Jacob set up
there; it became the temple city because God, manifesting Himself as Bethel,
was already there in an old betyl. Moreover, in Genesis 28.22, it is not the
place but the stele itself that is identified as בית א-להים; the text is
concerned with the stone, not just, or even primarily, with the city. The confluence
of terms and motifs in all three of these texts suggests the possibility that
some Israelites understood stelae or betyls to incarnate their deity. (Benjamin
D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009], 49-50)