Jacob, ever timorous, fled from Hivite vengeance after the destruction of Shechem, forsaking the property he had acquired there by purchase and the sword. He made his way southward to Beth-el, and there rested on the edge of the great mountain block of Central Palestine. Hard by was the city of Luz, soon to be eclipsed by the growing fame of the high-place on the height above it. Here, at Beth-el, an altar was erected by the patriarch to the God of the locality who had once appeared to him in a dream. It was the prototype of the altar that was hereafter to arise there when Beth-el had become a chief sanctuary of the house of Israel. Whether the altar stood on the high-place on the summit of the mountain, where the Beth-el or column of stone had been consecrated by Jacob, we do not know; there are indications in the prophets, however, that the high-place and the temple were separate from one another. Indeed, from the words of Genesis, it would seem that the altar and future temple were on the lower slope of the hill, close to the old Canaanitish town. Here, at any rate, on the road to the city, was that Allon-bachuth, that ‘Terebinth of Tears,’ which is referred to by Hosea (xii. 4), and is connected in the book of Genesis with the death of Deborah, the nurse of Rachel. In later days another Deborah dwelt under the shadow of a palm-tree on the same road (Judg. iv. 6), and modern critical ingenuity has accordingly discovered that the terebinth and the palm were one and the same tree. Beth-el, however, was still too near the Hivites of Shechem, and Jacob continued his journey to the south. The death of Isaac called him to Hebron, where, for the last time, he met his brother Esau, who came to take part in his father’s burial. But his own residence was at Beth-lehem, ‘the Temple of the god Lakhmu,’ called Ephrath in those early days.[94] Here Rachel died, and here accordingly was raised the tombstone which marked her grave down to the day when the book of Genesis assumed its present form.[95] It was ‘beyond the tower of Edar,’ the tower of ‘the Flock,’ that Jacob, we are told, ‘spread his tent.’ The tower of the Flock guarded the city-fortress of Jerusalem (Mic. iv. 8), and it was therefore between Jerusalem and Beth-lehem that the patriarch made his home. But his flocks were scattered northwards as far as Shechem, grazing on the mountain slopes under the charge of his sons. Jacob remained like a Bedâwi of to-day living among the settled inhabitants of the country, and yet keeping apart from them and sending his flocks far and wide wherever there was fresh grass and free pasturage.