And he built there an altar,—thus redeeming his vow (cf. Ecclesiastes 5:4)—and called the place El-beth-el:—i.e. God of Bethel. Not he called the place of God, or the place sacred to God, Bethel, nor he called the altar (Keil, Kalisch, Gerlach, &c.
), but he called the place where the altar was El-beth-el; i.e. either he devoted the place as sacred to the El of Bethel (Rosenmüller), or he gave to the place the name of (so. the place of) the El of Bethel, reading the first El as a genitive (Lange); or he called it El-Beth-el metaphorically, as Jerusalem afterwards was styled Jehovah Tsidkenu (Jeremiah 33:16) and Jehovah Shammah (Ezekiel 48:35; Inglis).
It has been proposed, after the LXX; to avoid the seeming incongruity of assigning such a name to a place, to read, he invoked upon the place the El of Bethel—because there God appeared unto him,—the El of Bethel was Jehovah (vide Genesis 28:13; Genesis 31:13)—when he fled from the face of his brother.