What Does Genesis 35:20 Mean?

And Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb. It is the pillar of Rachel's tomb, which is there to this day. The pillar over Rachel's tomb is one of three pillars Jacob sets up in this chapter (Bethel at verses 14-15 and here at Rachel's grave). The pattern of pillar-setting as memorial and covenant marker reflects Jacob's instinct to Mark significant encounters with permanent stone. The birth that killed Rachel and the Bethel encounter that blessed him are both memorialized by stone in the same chapter, grief and worship taking the same material form.

The phrase "which is there to this day" is the narrator's note connecting the ancestral past to the narrator's present with still-visible physical evidence. The tomb of Rachel at Bethlehem was a recognizable location in later Israelite memory (1 Samuel 10:2 mentions it in Samuel's instructions to Saul). The pillar Jacob set up was known, visited, and remembered across centuries after the patriarch who placed it there had himself died and been buried at Machpelah.

The pillar over Rachel's tomb is Jacob's farewell to the woman he loved above all others. He poured oil on the Bethel stone to worship God; he sets a pillar over Rachel's grave as an act of love and mourning. The same hands that performed the covenant ritual at Bethel also set the memorial stone over his wife's grave. Worship and grief inhabit the same chapter; the covenant family's greatest spiritual renewal (the Bethel return) and its deepest personal loss (Rachel's death) arrive in the same narrative space, neither canceling the other.