Where in the World is Jacob (Israel) San Diego?

     I've been laboring through Leviticus and Numbers. As someone who focuses quite often on the books of the Old Testament, I find Leviticus particularly tough to trudge through again. To ease my mind some, I decided to take a look back through the last part of Genesis. There, something caught my attention that never had before: Stephen and the writer of Genesis seem to be at odds with what became of Jacob's body. I became very interested in why Stephen would, during a passionate attempt to defend himself in front of the Sanhedrin, make the statement that Jacob was buried over 50 miles away from where Genesis said he was.
     The writer of Genesis clearly records that, having prepared himself for his approaching death, Jacob tells his sons to bury him in the place that his ancestor, Abraham, had purchased and used as a burial site: "Then he commanded them and said to them, "I am to be gathered to my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field at Machpelah, to the east of Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess as a burying place" (Gen 49:29-30). Machpelah is a small area just outside of the city of Hebron.

In Acts 7, however, Stephen seems to mention almost offhandedly that Jacob is buried in Shechem, not Hebron. While obviouly not the best quality in the world, this picture up above shows the distance from Hebron in the south, to Shechem in the north. I wondered to myself, "Is 50 miles really that big a difference when we're dealing with parts of the Bible written thousands of years apart?" Because of the specificity in which Jacob's death and burial are recorded in the Old Testament, I tend to see it as a glaring difference. I managed to find a couple different ideas of why Stephen would have made this "error."
     Stephen was an extremely learned man. He knew his Genesis, just as the members of the Sanhedrin knew theirs. Perhaps the most important aspect of this entire conundrum is that the Sanhedrin, a group of men who had brought charges against Stephen and were looking for a chance to find him in the wrong, didn't raise a single objection when Stephen got the burial site of one of the most important patriarchs of their society wrong by over 50 miles. Why? Everyone at this hearing was intimately knowledgeable of what Genesis had to say on the matter of Jacob's tomb, yet they said nothing. I agree with Kyle Butt in thinking that this only leaves us with two real options: either Stephen was right and his statements only seem to be mistakes to us, or Stephen was right and his statements were copied and handed down to us incorrectly.
     What follows next in my research is a lot of very complicated analysis of the original text in ancient Greek that I, who can't even manage my own English correctly most of the time, don't begin to fully understand. Luckily, I found some places that rather simplified the details. What's important is that there's a chance that the verbs used in the correct connotation meant that Stephen was referring to the loss of some of the other Israelite patriarchs and their burials in Shechem. It is, apparently, a known fact that Joseph was buried in Shechem, so this argument seems to hold some water. Some people even believe that the Jews in Stephen's day were so disgusted that the Samaritans (some of their most bitter rivals) had captured Shechem that they even went to the trouble of falsifying the text of the Old Testament to hide their shame; they didn't want to admit that some of their patriarchs were buried in what had become enemy territory.
     Butt's (and yes I laugh a little every time I write that word) description of what may have happened to the land that the tomb rested in is written better than I could possibly manage:

"We know that Abraham lived for a  time in the land of Shechem, even building an altar there (Genesis  12:5-6). We also know that Jacob went to Shechem and set up his tent  there about 185 years later (Genesis 33:18). Perhaps in the intervening  time period, the native people had taken back the land, and, rather than  fighting to reclaim what already was his, Jacob simply bought the land  back peaceably. Thus, the land would have been purchased twice—first  by Abraham, and then, almost two centuries later, by Jacob. This, too,  appears to be a logical reconciliation of the facts."

This would explain how Stephen's statement just seems to us to be in contradiction to Genesis, but isn't necessarily. As Mrs. Foster said in class, if the framers of the Bible had decided to include EVERY SINGLE detail about the events contained in the Bible, there wouldn't even be a way to bind that book together.

http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-inconsistency-in-the-New-Testament-regarding-where-Abraham-was-buried
http://www.faithfirstmedia.com/apps/blog/show/2080305-jacob-s-family-tomb-a-contradiction-in-the-bible-
http://jewsforjudaism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83:which-version-of-stephenss-acts-7-speech-is-correct&catid=53:disciples&Itemid=491