But the vision was more than a mere dream.  God appeared in it to the patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his fathers.  Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of Abraham was to be carried on.  When he awoke in the morning the fugitive recognized the real character of his dream.  He took, accordingly, the stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar, poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or “House of God,” Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.

The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones.  They are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of the Old Testament in Northern Arabia.  In Phoenicia we are told that they abounded.  The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; it rose up awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a protection from the perils of the night.  When his worship and adoration came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess Asherah.  The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual dwelling-place was in heaven.

The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his dream bore the name of Luz.  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.  Bethel was also Beth-On, “the temple of On,” from whence the tribe of Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, “the Onite.”  Beth-On has survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known as Beitin.

It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia.  His new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean.  In the land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of patriarchal Palestine.