A name is sounded. We don’t know why. But the sound is just there in the text.
Now Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak outside Bethel. So it was named Allon Bakuth. (Oak of weeping)
(Vs8)
She is probably the unnamed nurse that came with Rebekah. We don’t know of her before, we don’t know of her later. And we don’t truly even know where she is in the story. Is she with Jacob? With Esau? With Isaac? But she is important. She is sounded and her place of burial is sounded.
Later Isaac is buried (Vs. What of Rebekah, his wife? We don’t hear of her anymore. Is her part in Jacob’s deceit the reason why she is silenced? Possibly this is why Deborah is sounded.
Jacob goes to Bethel,
where God talked with him
where God talked with him
(Vs13 and Vs14)
The ‘with’ allows us to imagine conversation. An exchange of sounds. A sound isn’t used dominatingly upon the weaker one.
Yet Jacob is still dominating with his sound. When Rachel is dying her last recorded sound is the naming of the child who causes her death. Ben-oni the son of sorrow is renamed Benjamin. Jacob the grasper, who himself is renamed Israel (the striver) is still grasping to his old ways.