Put Away the Foreign Gods

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After the violence of the last chapter, God calls Jacob back to Bethel — the same place he once slept on a stone pillow and dreamed of a stairway to heaven. This chapter closes several long threads at once: the idols Rachel stole from Laban, the name Israel given at Peniel, and finally, in the span of a few verses, both a wife and a father.

Walk-through

Put away the foreign gods (verses 1–4)

Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments. Let's arise, and go up to Bethel.

Genesis 35:2

Jacob gathers every foreign idol in his household — including, presumably, the ones Rachel took from her father back in chapter 31 — and buries them under a tree near Shechem. It's a quiet but significant moment: before returning to the place he first met God, Jacob clears out everything competing for that place in his household. Genesis doesn't dramatize it. It simply happens, and the family moves on unmolested by the surrounding cities, protected by what the text calls "a terror of God."

Israel, again (verses 5–15)

At Bethel, God appears to Jacob once more and repeats what was already spoken at Peniel:

Your name is Jacob. Your name shall not be Jacob any more, but your name will be Israel. I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations will be from you, and kings will come out of your body.

Genesis 35:10

The covenant Abraham and Isaac carried is confirmed again, now fully Jacob's — or rather, Israel's. The name isn't a one-time event from a single desperate night. God repeats it here, in daylight, at the very place the whole journey began.

Rachel dies giving birth (verses 16–20)

Then, without warning, grief arrives. On the road, Rachel goes into hard labor and doesn't survive it.

As her soul was departing (for she died), she named him Benoni, but his father named him Benjamin.

Genesis 35:18

Benoni means "son of my sorrow." Jacob renames him Benjamin — "son of the right hand" — unwilling to let his last son's name carry only the weight of his mother's death. It's a small act of love in the middle of enormous loss, the same instinct that renamed Jacob himself not long before.

Isaac dies (verses 21–29)

The chapter also records, briefly and without dwelling on it, one of Reuben's own failures — sleeping with his father's concubine, a betrayal that will cost him later. Then, closing out the whole patriarchal generation:

Isaac gave up the spirit and died, and was gathered to his people, old and full of days.

Genesis 35:29

Esau and Jacob bury their father together — the same reconciliation Isaac himself never fully witnessed, now sealed at his own grave.

Take with you

Returning to the place you first met God sometimes means clearing things out first. Jacob couldn't go back to Bethel carrying idols his household had been dragging along the whole way.

God repeats Jacob's new name here, in a settled, daylight moment, not just in the desperate dark of a wrestling match. Some truths about who you've become need saying more than once before they feel real.

And carry Rachel's death honestly alongside Benjamin's name. Sorrow and hope sat in the very same moment — a mother's dying word and a father's determined naming, both true at once.