Jacob’s vow was performed, at least in part, when once more he returned to Canaan. Then again ‘God appeared to him’ and changed the patriarch’s name. Then again, too, ‘he set up a pillar of stone; and he poured a drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him Beth-el.’ This second account of the naming of the place doubtless comes from a different source from that which recorded Jacob’s dream, and is the account which was known to Hosea, the prophet of the northern kingdom. Modern critics have alleged that it is inconsistent with the first, and that consequently neither the one nor the other is historical. The compiler of the book of Genesis, however, thought otherwise; he has made no attempt to smooth over what the European scholar declares to be inconsistencies, and which therefore cannot have seemed inconsistencies to him. The Oriental mode of writing history, it must once more be remarked, is not the same as ours; and as it is with the ancient East that we are now concerned, it would be wiser to follow the judgment of the writer of Genesis than that of his European critics. At Harran Jacob served his cousin Laban ‘for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.’ Such contracts of voluntary service are to be found in the Babylonian tablets of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. It was not at all unusual for a slave to be hired out to another master for a definite period of time; it sometimes happened that the master himself hired out his own services in a similar way.[85] In Babylonia the work was partly pastoral, partly agricultural; the semi-Bedâwi Jacob was a herdsman only. His cousin Laban bore a name which was also that of an Assyrian deity; and it may not be a mere coincidence that when Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, restored the great temple of the moon-god at Harran, he tells us that he began the task ‘by the art of the god Laban, the god of foundations and brickwork.’[86]