Here is a small problem that distracts from serious engagement with Israel, Syria, Iran, Turkey, or Lebanon, and yet is part of the story that peoples of the area have long been sharing. In chapter 31 of Genesis, stones are set as witnesses for a deal between Laban and Jacob. There is an etiological aspect to the tale. It betrays the scholar-scribe at work who is explaining geographical features to a nation that has already developed a sense of its history and has asked questions regarding its land and its original possessors. The mound of stones in 31:46–7 is called “stone heap of (the) witness”, גל־עד in Hebrew and in Aramaic יגר שׂהדותא, two syllables in Hebrew instead of five in Aramaic. The Hebrew of 31:47 is: וַיִּקְרָא־לוֹ לָבָן יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא וְיַעֲקֹב קָרָא לוֹ גַּלְעֵד whereas LXX has: καὶ ἐκάλεσεν αὐτὸν Λαβαν Βουνὸς τῆς μαρτυρίας (articulated, as in the Aramaic), Ιακωβ δὲ ἐκάλεσεν αὐτον Βουνὸς μάρτυς. Jacob, according to the LXX, translates literally: Βουνὸς μάρτυς. A page of the Yerushalmi Talmud discusses the nature of the sacred language in regard to this passage of Genesis 31 and compares it to Aramaic and other languages (ySoṭah 7:2,21c = HDHL p. 933, lines 28–48)

This could simply be an explanation for ancient megalithic circles of the type found at Rujum al Hiri, the cat’s foot on the Golan, whatever their origin. But nothing is so simple! So, how is one to interpret the little linguistic lesson that is going on? Here goes my interpretation. The stone-heap would be marking the border between Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking people. The name given in Aramaic is long and seems scholarly, unnatural, whereas the Hebrew name is short and fits the Gil`ad region in Transjordan. The stones are witness to an international border, protecting against violence and practically against preying upon women, which is a subtext of the Jacob story. Laban himself is the one preying here, whereas Jacob has been fulfilling his contracts (often changed, he claims). Allow me to conclude my short page with its most important idea. The distant historical background is the contested relationship between Aramaean and Israelite monarchs in the 9th-8th c. BCE. It was revised much later—in the fifth century under the Persian empire?—when the memory of a pre-monarchic state was invoked as founding ground for a revived people whose central definition was acceptance of a covenant with the divinity, not with its kings. Note that this is the period when the Aramean script became the support for the Torah, while the so-called Paleohebrew script almost disappeared—except in Samaria—until it was resurrected much later as support for the Hasmonean monarchy.

Note also that various parts of the Jacob’s cycle of stories or life are marked by stones that serve therefore as rhetorical boundaries. Stones appear at the end of the first stay of Jacob in Canaan, ch. 28, then upon his return to Canaan in ch. 31, and finally upon Rachel’s death, ch. 35:20.