Fretheim argued that one may see more significant levels of correspondence between the two Bethel stories in and , and one may view the oracle to Rebekah in regarding "struggling" as parallel to Jacob's struggle at the Jabbok in . Fretheim concluded that these four instances of Divine speaking link to each other in complex ways. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman argue that the stories about Jacob and Laban metaphorically express the complex and stormy relations between the nations of Aram and Israel over many centuries. Cynthia Chapman suggested that Judeans compiled and edited the ancestor narratives in Genesis after the Babylonian captivity to serve as stories of national origin. Chapman noted that several recurring themes of the Patriarchal narratives spoke to the exilic reality of those who preserved the stories. These stories emphasize God's presence and power transcending national boundaries, the special covenant between God and Abraham's descendants, the eternal nature of their covenant relationship, and the everlasting gift of the Promised Land. The stories also acknowledge tensions that threaten the protagonists. Jacob spent most of his adult life in Mesopotamia, and stories of hard-won children who were born into a land inheritance spoke powerfully to an exilic community that had lost many children to war and sickness during the long journey to exile. The Israelites viewed their world as a family tree; the story of Jacob's family became the basis for how the Israelites understood themselves socially and politically as an alliance of 12 tribes; and where tribes stood in relation to each other. The process by which Jacob became Israel involved fleeing, exile, and hard labor. From the perspective of a people exiled from their land living in Mesopotamia, Jacob's story was a powerful story of redemption. The Tribe of Judah also endured hard labor, took wives and had children, replenishing themselves into something resembling a nation. Many would build wealth in exile, and when they returned during the Persian period, they returned not as Judah, but as Israel, renamed before they crossed the Jordan River back into the Promised Land. Genesis chapter 28 Ephraim Speiser saw in two accounts about Jacob's first stay at Bethel that were blended into a single sequence. and 17 use the Divine name Elohim (), while and 16 use the Tetragrammaton (). Speiser argued that taken as a unit, the fused version is repetitious, but separately, each strand represents an