5 min read

God Called Heaven and Earth to Answer Jacob

He had crossed the Jordan with nothing but a staff and been given everything after that. Then a king asked his age and got a complaint.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. He Said It in Front of Pharaoh
  2. The Rest of the Family Had Done It Too
  3. The Man Who Married Off His Daughter
  4. I Praised You Before You Existed
  5. Go Back to Your Staff
God Called Heaven and Earth to Answer Jacob Click for full size

He Said It in Front of Pharaoh

An old man was brought into the throne room in Egypt, where his son was second in the kingdom and the famine had been broken and the whole family had come down and been given the best land in the country.

Pharaoh asked him how old he was.

"Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life."

Jacob had crossed the Jordan with nothing in his hand but a staff, and everything after that had been given to him. God heard the answer he gave the king of Egypt.

"Have I done you evil, Jacob, that you speak like this?"

The Rest of the Family Had Done It Too

There were thirteen kinds of fragrant plants in the garden of Eden and ten chambers in it, and the man who lived there was not left alone in it, because it was not good for a man to be alone.

Adam owed a thank-you for that. What he said instead, standing among the plants with the juice still on his hands, was: the woman You gave me.

Abraham went to war and came back a king over sixteen kings with all the captives freed, and he took that for his payment. So God told him the payment had not started yet, your reward is very great. He owed a thank-you there too. What he said was, Lord God, what will You give me?

And the people in the desert, who had been carried the way a man carries his son, looked at the bread coming down out of the sky and said their souls were sick of this light bread.

Four generations, one habit. Why do you say, Jacob, and speak, Israel, that your way is hidden from the Lord?

The Man Who Married Off His Daughter

God answered him with a story about a wedding.

A man gave his daughter away and then set about making friends with the son-in-law, and in the middle of the courting he said the thing that was really on his mind. "I am not going to be feeding her."

The son-in-law did not argue with him. He said, "It is not what you say. It is what the third one between us says."

Jacob's daughter is the Assembly of Israel. The son-in-law is God. Jacob had started in on the terms, and the answer came back the same way.

"Not what you say. Let heaven be the witness that I fed your children, because it is written, behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. Let the earth be the witness that I gave them water, because it is written, the well that the princes dug. Both of them stood there while it happened. Ask them."

I Praised You Before You Existed

"And all of this comes out of the love I have for you. I have loved Jacob. When Israel was a child, I loved him.

"Can a king praise a man he has never laid eyes on? I praised you before you were made."

The hiddenness Jacob was complaining about had been in the terms from the beginning, and he had been told. Before he was born it was said of him that his way would be hidden and that his hand would come out holding his brother's heel. A hedged road was what he was given. He walked it for a hundred and thirty years and then described it to a foreign king as short and bad.

Rabbi Shmuel said a living man has no business complaining about his own sins, the ones his own hands could have stopped. Rabbi Shimon put it lower than that. Why should a man complain at all? He is alive. He can see this sun.

Go Back to Your Staff

"Return to your staff," God told him.

He had crossed the river with it. He was going to bless the twelve of them leaning on it, propped up on the bed with his sons around him, handing out futures. In the middle of that blessing, between Dan and Gad, he broke off and said something that was not a blessing for anyone in the room. I wait for Your salvation, Lord.

That is the sentence. Say that one.

And the sentence he ended with was not the one he gave Pharaoh. Great troubles have surrounded me from my youth, Jacob said, and even so, they were not able to overcome me. Not the adversary, and not the inclination inside me either.

The Assembly of Israel took the line and sang it going up the steps. They had been embittered in Egypt with mortar and brick. They rebelled at the sea itself, with the water standing open on both sides. They were struck in the wilderness. And through all of it God's own son stayed put between the two sons of Amram, with Aaron on one side and Moses on the other, and the pressure came from outside and inside at once and did not get through.

Many have afflicted me from my youth. That is the first line of the song. It is not the last one.

IsraelExileRedemptionYetzer HaraJudah
← All myths

From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Aggadat Bereshit 63Aggadat Bereshit

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Sefaria Community Translation · CC0

"And it came to pass at that time that Judah went down" (Genesis 38:1). The rabbis heard in "went down" more than geography. Judah left his brothers, married a Canaanite woman, and began a sequence of events that included the death of two sons, the seduction of his daughter-in-law Tamar, and the near-execution of the woman carrying his own twins. The going-down was moral as much as spatial.

God speaks through Micah: "Even though I made a covenant with your father Abraham and told him to 'Arise, walk through the land' (Genesis 13:17).. and I brought you into a land of fruitful fields.. you have defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination" (Jeremiah 2:7). The covenant was kept. The gift was given. The land was entered. And still, the covenant's terms were violated. The "going down" is the pattern, every gift of the covenant is followed by a potential descent, a test of whether the gift will be received with gratitude or taken for granted.

Judah's story does not end in the descent. It ends with him standing before Joseph in Egypt and offering himself as a slave in place of Benjamin. The man who had sold his brother into slavery was now offering his own freedom for his brother. The rabbis read the entire trajectory, down from his brothers, down into the morally compromised Adullamite marriage, and then slowly back up toward the man who would become the ancestor of David and the messianic line, as the Torah's model of teshuvah, of return. You can go down. The question is whether you come back up.

Full source
Aggadat Bereshit 62Aggadat Bereshit

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Sefaria Community Translation · CC0

"Many peoples have afflicted me from my youth" (Psalm 129:1). The Assembly of Israel, the collective voice of the nation, says this as a Song of Ascents, sung while ascending to the Temple. The affliction began in Egypt. It continued through every subsequent empire. And the rabbis added a layer: the inclination within Israel itself was part of the affliction, the yetzer hara that made Israel its own enemy as often as the nations were.

Song of Songs provides the counter-image: the beloved resting between two things (Song of Songs 1:13). The rabbis read those two things as Moses and Aaron, the two sons of Amram who flanked Israel through the wilderness. When the nations pressed from outside and the evil inclination pressed from within, Moses and Aaron were the twin pillars of protection. Prophecy and priesthood, word and rite, the voice that descended from Sinai and the incense that rose toward heaven.

At the sea, when Israel was most pressed, Egypt behind them and the water in front, they were still protected. "He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty" (Psalm 91:1). The nations could afflict. The evil inclination could rebel. But neither could touch Israel while the everlasting arms were beneath them. The song of affliction is also the song of survival. Both are true. The Psalm holds both in the same breath.

Full source