🔼The name Bethel: Summary
- Meaning
- House Of God
- Etymology
- From (1) the noun בית (beth), house, and (2) the word אל ('el), God.
🔼The name Bethel in the Bible
There are two Bethels mentioned in the Bible: (1) an obscure town in Simeon (1 Samuel 30:27), and (2) the famous one that would fall within the borders of Benjamin (Judges 21:19). That Bethel was named so by Jacob after he sees his famous vision in which a ladder reaches into the heavens. Before that event this town was known as Luz (Genesis 28:19). Long before Jacob, Abraham dwelled there too (Genesis 12:8). And long after, the judge Samuel held court in Bethel (1 Samuel 7:15).
Bethel is also the location of the gruesome scene in which two bears kill 42 boys after they mocked the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 2:23). Like the goings on in the Book of Job, this scene too comments of the state of affairs in the intellectual world rather than a "historical" report of something that "really happened". The Books of Kings were written by Jews in the Babylonian exile, possibly when the first waves or returnees had begun to resettle Judea and had started to restore the Temple of YHWH, and the Pharisees began to form whilst in Persia the great Wisdom schools emerged. From these schools would come the Torah first, then the whole Tanakh, and then the Talmud. And of course the magi, who were the first to know about the newborn Christ and also knew where to look for him (Matthew 2:1). Persia was not only the first true empire, in which many autonomous populations were governed intact by one well-advised emperor, the Persians also perfected the road system (see οδος, hodos, road) and would invent the postal service (see αγγελος, aggelos, postman or "angel").
Before the number 42 facetiously became "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" (and the number of emanation in Kabbalah), it was the signature number of Egypt: the body of Osiris had been cut into 42 pieces, which upon his resurrection came to represent the 42 districts of the united Egypt. The two bears represent the Greek pantheon: the two bears who had raised Zeus and were commemorated as Ursa Major and Minor around which the μοδιος (modios) of the night sky revolved. The two bears' revolution around Polaris inspired the formation of the swastika (hence every modern reference to two ravenous polar bears: from LOST to Narnia's chariot-of-Jadis pulling polar bears to Fortitude, the TV series). The scene of the two bears who slay the 42 lads of Bethel, whilst Elisha walks on unscathed foretells how Greek (and later Roman) tradition would overwhelm the Egyptian one (it obviously did in the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic era), whilst the Jewish tradition of wisdom and learning would wax onto maturity and increasingly govern the world, invisibly from behind the world's waning pagan thrones.
The name Bethel is mostly spelled with a maqqep, but in Genesis 35:16, Joshua 8:17, 1 Kings 12:32 and Jeremiah 48:13 it's spelled without (בית אל). The ethnonym of the unfortunate Hiel the Bethelite is spelled בית האלי (1 Kings 16:34). And since the god of Shechem was called El-berith, its temple was known as בית אל ברית or Beth-El-berith (Judges 9:46).
🔼Etymology of the name Bethel
The name Bethel consists of two elements. The first part of the name is the word בית (bayit), meaning house:
בית
The noun בית (bayit) means house. It sometimes merely denotes a domestic building, but mostly it denotes the realm of authority of the house-father, or אב (ab). This ab is commonly the living alpha male of a household, but may very well be a founding ancestor (as in the familiar term the "house of Israel"). The אב (ab) may also be a deity, in which case the בית (bayit) is that which we know as a temple.
In the larger economy, a house interacts with other houses. These interactions are governed by the אב (ab), or "father" and executed by the בנים (benim), or "sons": those people living in the house, irrespective of any biological relation with the אב (ab). The "sons" combined add up to אם ('em), which means both "mother" and "tribe".
The second part is אל (El), the common abbreviation of Elohim, the Hebrew word for God:
אל אלה
In names אל ('el) usually refers to אלהים ('elohim), that is Elohim, or God, also known as אלה ('eloah). In English, the words 'God' and 'god' exclusively refer to the deity but in Hebrew the words אל ('l) and אלה ('lh) are far more common and may express approach and negation, acts of wailing and pointing, and may even mean oak or terebinth.
🔼Bethel meaning
The name Bethel means House Of God.