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Updated: June 26, 2025
The plurality of wives in this instance was not so much the choice of Jacob as the fault of the wily, semi-idolatrous Laban. Shechem offered dowry to Jacob and his sons if they would consent to his taking Dinah to wife; but it is evident he did so in order to conciliate the outraged brothers of the girl whom he had so basely humbled, and whom he really desired to retain.
The heights of Carmel, it has been frequently remarked, enjoy a pure and enlivening atmosphere, while the lower grounds of Samaria and Galileo are obscured by the densest fogs. The Shechem of the Scriptures, successively known by the names of Neapolis and Nablous, still contains a considerable population, although its dwellings are mean and its inhabitants poor.
After this he took Samega, and the neighboring places; and besides these, Shechem and Gerizzim, and the nation of the Cutheans, who dwelt at the temple which resembled that temple which was at Jerusalem, and which Alexander permitted Sanballat, the general of his army, to build for the sake of Manasseh, who was son-in-law to Jaddua the high priest, as we have formerly related; which temple was now deserted two hundred years after it was built.
I slew Shechem first of all, and then Simon slew Hamor, and all my other brothers came out and destroyed the whole city. Our father took this in ill part, and in his blessing he remembered our conduct.
In the south was Hebron among the mountains; on the shore of the Great Sea were Gaza, and Joppa, and Cæsarea; in the middle of the land were Shechem and Samaria; and in the north were Nazareth, and Cana; down by the shore of the Sea of Galilee were Tiberias, and Capernaum, and Bethsaida.
Jacob and Esau met and were reconciled, and Jacob then journeyed onwards to Succoth, "the booths." The site of this village of "booths" is unknown, but it could not have been far from the banks of the Jordan and the road to Nablûs. The neighbourhood of Shechem, called in Greek times Neapolis, the Nablûs of to-day, was the next resting-place of the patriarch.
We do not know by what route he passed the Syrian desert, but he halted at Shechem, situated in a fruitful valley, one of the passes of the hills from Damascus to Canaan. He then built an altar to the Lord, probably among an idolatrous people.
The seven kings of the Amorites, when they heard the evil that the sons of Jacob had done to the city of Shechem, assembled together, with all their armies, ten thousand men, with drawn swords, and they came to fight against the sons of Jacob. And Jacob was greatly afraid, and he said to Simon and Levi, "Why have you brought such evil upon me?
"And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of silver." Few tombs on earth command the veneration of so many races and men of divers creeds as this of Joseph.
But after an eight days' march he encountered a powerful army, which had been dispatched from Nineveh to levy tribute upon the whole world and subjugate it. On coming in the vicinity of Shechem, this army heard to what the city had been exposed at the hands of the sons of Jacob, and fury seized the men, and they resolved to make war upon Jacob.
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