Genesis 35:4 - Exposition

And they gave mate Jacob all the strange gods —Rosenmüller thinks these must have been many, since the historian would not otherwise have used the term כֹּל — which were in their hand ( i.e. which they possessed), and all their earrings which were in their ears ;— i.e. those employed for purposes of idolatrous worship, which were often covered with allegorical figures and mysterious sentences, and supposed to be endowed with a talismanic virtue ( 8:21 ; Isaiah 3:20 ; Hosea 2:13 )— and Jacob hid them —having probably first destroyed them, since they do not appear to have been ever after sought for or resumed by the parties who gave them up (Hughes)— under the oak which was by Shechem. Whether the oak, or terebinth, under which Abraham once pitched his tent ( Genesis 12:6 ), that beneath whose shade Joshua afterwards erected his memorial pillar ( Joshua 24:26 ), the oak of the sorcerers ( 9:37 ), and the oak of the pillar at Shechem ( 9:6 ) were all the tree under which Jacob buried the images and earrings cannot with certainty be determined, though the probability is that they were.