ABSTRACT
Israel 1 was the name divinely received by Jacob, a Hebrew 2 patriarch, in the seventeenth century b.c. He was a grandson of Abraham, a leader of a nomadic Hebrew tribe from Mesopotamia who, according to the Book of Genesis of the Old Testament, had an encounter with the Lord God ‘Jehovah’ 3 when he was in the land of Haran, present-day southern Turkey. Jehovah promised to make Abraham’s descendants His Chosen People, if he would go ‘unto a land that I will show thee’. 4 As Abraham and his family passed Shechem (present-day Nablus), Jehovah appeared to Abraham, and said, ‘Unto thy seed I will give this land’. 5 Shechem was then part of the land of the Canaanites, whose occupation of the region dated back to 4000 b.c.
