1. God told Jacob, “Return to Bethel, where I appeared to you when you were running from your brother Esau. Make your home there and build an altar for me.”
2. Jacob said to his family and to everyone else who was travelling with him:Get rid of your foreign gods! Then make yourselves acceptable to worship God and put on clean clothes.
3. Afterwards, we'll go to Bethel. I will build an altar there for God, who answered my prayers when I was in trouble and who has always been at my side.
4. So everyone gave Jacob their idols and their earrings, and he buried them under the oak tree near Shechem.
5. While Jacob and his family were travelling through Canaan, God terrified the people in the towns so much that no one dared bother them.
6. Finally, they reached Bethel, also known as Luz.
7. Jacob built an altar there and called it “God of Bethel”, because that was the place where God had appeared to him when he was running from Esau.
8. While they were there, Rebekah's personal servant Deborah died. They buried her under an oak tree and called it “Weeping Oak”.
9-11. After Jacob came back to the land of Canaan, God appeared to him again. This time he gave Jacob a new name and blessed him by saying:I am God All-Powerful, and from now on your name will be Israel instead of Jacob. You will have many children. Your descendants will become nations, and some of the men in your family will even be kings.