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Updated: June 19, 2025
Beth-sha-el, on the contrary, is Beth-el. We first meet with the name in the geographical lists of Thothmes III., and the fact that it is Babylonian in form, Bit-sa-ili being the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Beth-el, is one of many proofs that the lists were compiled from a cuneiform original.
So it came to pass that Jehu, the destroyer of Baal worship, did nothing to oppose the idolatrous service established by Jeroboam at Beth-el. The successors of Jehu were not better; on the contrary, they were worse, and therefore in the fifth generation an end was put to the dynasty of Jehu by the hand of the assassin.
'Calves, says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity, he says, instead of Beth-el, 'the house of God. A fine god whose worshippers had to be alarmed for its safety!
On the morrow, Isaac told his son that he would not accompany him to Beth-el on account of his great age, but he bade him not delay longer to fulfil his vow, and gave him permission to take his mother Rebekah with him to the holy place. And Rebekah and her nurse Deborah went to Beth-el with Jacob.
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.
The belief, common to all antiquity, though not necessarily valid on that account, is not discernible in Hebrew thought, perhaps for the reason that it is not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the myth of Eden barely conceals it. It is almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el. Solomon said: "I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or ever earth was."
In her simplicity, her colouring, her solitude, she was biblical; she might have been a woman of the Old Testament asking for succour or sanctuary at the tent of Abraham pitched between Beth-el and Hai; she might have been a woman fleeing from the wrath of Moses, who gave unto sin its strength when, out of sheer solicitude for the soul-welfare of the masses, he made laws about things to which in the innocence of their hearts they had, up till then, never given two thoughts.
A significant variation occurs in the final threatening, in which Beth-el is set forth as the cause, rather than as the object, of the destruction. 'They were the ruin of him and of all Israel. Our vices are made the whips to scourge us. Our idols bring us no help, but are the causes of our misery.
In Israelitish days, however, the name of the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On, a name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt.
Abraham had to quit Egypt, and once more he traversed the desert of the "South" and pitched his tent near Beth-el. Here his nephew Lot left him, and, dissatisfied with the life of a wandering Bedawi, took up his abode in the city of Sodom at the northern end of the Dead Sea.
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