And they journeyed, and the terror of God was upon the cities that were all around them, and they did not pursue the sons of Jacob. Genesis 35:5 (NKJV)
In the previous chapter, Jacob was concerned that his sons Simeon and Levi had made enemies of all the people around them. They did, after all, trick the men of Shechem into getting circumcised, and then killed them all while they were suffering in pain.
Here in Genesis 35, the text says that the "terror of God" was upon the cities so they did not pursue. Perhaps this is related to the previous verse, which mentions that Jacob buried all the idols under the terebinth tree. This act of public burial of idols (the same gods that the Canaanites and the Perizzites may have worshiped) might have been tied to the peoples' fear of the God of Jacob.