Bethel: a town in the hills north of Jerusalem whose name means "house of God," named by Jacob after God met him there, and later home to the northern kingdom's royal shrine that the prophets attacked
The name is a short sentence: "house of God." It belongs to a town on the ridge road about a dozen miles north of Jerusalem, and the Bible says the place was called Luz (לוּז) before Israel arrived. Jacob, running from his brother and sleeping there on a stone, dreams of a stairway with God standing above it, wakes up frightened, and says that this is nothing less than the house of God. Then he gives the place that name, and it sticks.
Because the name makes a claim, the word does more than mark a dot on a map. What a given sentence has in view is usually plain from what is happening in it:
- armies, tribal borders and lists of returning families use it as an ordinary location, a town with roads running past it
- Jacob's story uses it for the spot where God turned up, and later Israel goes there to weep and to ask God what to do
- the books of Kings use it for the sanctuary Jeroboam built, with a golden calf in it, to keep his people from travelling south to Jerusalem
- Amos and Hosea use it for the whole northern religion they are attacking, altars and priests and festivals together
That last turn is why a small town matters out of all proportion to its size. A king who wanted a sanctuary of his own picked the site with the best possible pedigree, the one Jacob himself had named, and the worship he set up there is judged a betrayal. Amos is thrown out of it for preaching, and told to his face that it is the king's own sanctuary. Hosea will not say the name straight, calling the town "house of nothing" (בֵּית אָוֶן) instead of house of God, and Amos works the same twist into a single line, warning that Bethel will come to nothing. Josiah eventually pulls the altar down and burns bones on it.
The town is rarely named alone. It is paired with Dan (דָּן) at the far northern end of the kingdom as the second of Jeroboam's two calf shrines, and set beside Gilgal (גִּלְגָּל) when Amos lists the places Israel keeps going to worship and tells them to stop going.
Nuances
Whether the name in Jeremiah 48:13 refers by metonymy to the sanctuary at Bethel and its cult, or to a deity named Bethel.
- majorityIt denotes the Bethel sanctuary and its calf cult, named as the object of northern Israel's misplaced confidence and set in parallel with Chemosh by metonymy.; HALOT, s.v. בֵּית־אֵל; William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 2, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996)
- minorityIt is the divine name Bethel, a god attested in Aramean personal names and in the Elephantine papyri, placed in strict parallel with the Moabite god Chemosh.; Otto Eissfeldt, "Der Gott Bethel," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 28 (1930): 1-30; J. Philip Hyatt, "The Deity Bethel and the Old Testament," Journal of the American Oriental Society 59 (1939): 81-98