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In France, Condorcet eulogized him in the Academy of Science, and Mirabeau in the National Assembly. The latter said: "Antiquity would have erected altars to this great and powerful genius." When Rachel was dying, she named her infant son "Ben-oni," which means, "son of my sorrow," because he was the occasion of her sufferings and death.

But Jacob, his father, called him "Benjamin," which signifies "the son of a right hand." There was a time when Franklin's mother, weeping over her runaway boy, would have called him "Ben-oni," and it might have appeared to observers that he would turn out to be such.

Benjamin or Ben-Oni was, as a tribe, merely the southern portion of the house of Joseph, which had settled around the sanctuary of Beth-On or Beth-el. Benjamin means the "Southerner," and Ben-Oni "the inhabitant of Beth-On." It is even questionable whether the son of Jacob from whom the tribe was held to be descended bore the name of Benjamin.

Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known as Beitîn. It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia.