hivevars not going through with beeline in emr - hive

Question

I am running a hive sql script in emr. I am calling the script from beeline (in a shell file) with some hivevars. But they are not going through to the script. Am I missing something obvious?
This is my shell script:
ST_DATE=$(TZ=America/Los_Angeles date +%Y-%m-%d -d "today");
beeline -u jdbc:hive2:// --hivevar ST_DATE="$ST_DATE" --hivevar lookback=45 -f ./ETL/predict_etl_hive.sql || exit 1
And this is how the hive sql file is
-- DEBUG display hivevars
select '${hivevar:lookback}';
select '${hivevar:ST_DATE}';
------------------- STEP 1: ----------------------------
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS string1.us_past_con_${hivevar:lookback}d;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS string1.us_past_con_${hivevar:lookback}d
However it does not take the values. when using select to get the values it stays as the name:
0: jdbc:hive2://>
0: jdbc:hive2://> -- DEBUG display hivevars
0: jdbc:hive2://> select '${hivevar:lookback}';
+----------------------+
| _c0 |
+----------------------+
| ${hivevar:lookback} |
+----------------------+
0: jdbc:hive2://> select '${hivevar:ST_DATE}';
+---------------------+
| _c0 |
+---------------------+
| ${hivevar:ST_DATE} |
+---------------------+
And then it eventually fails at the DROP line:
FAILED: ParseException line 1:46 missing EOF at '$' near 'us_past_con_'
22/07/06 21:53:11 [ef15917c-31f8-48ae-8ca4-770871367e05 main]: ERROR ql.Driver: FAILED: ParseException line 1:46 missing EOF at '$' near 'us_past_con_'
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.parse.ParseException: line 1:46 missing EOF at '$' near 'us_past_con_'
The vars do go through if I use hive -f instead of beeline