Jacob Read the Land Before the Land Was His

The Stone at Bethel

He was running. His brother Esau had sworn to kill him after the blessing was stolen. His mother had sent him north to Haran to find a wife among her family. He traveled alone, the first time in his life he had been without the household of his father around him, and when the sun went down he was in a place with no shelter and nothing but stones.

He took one of the stones and put it under his head and lay down on the ground and slept. The dream that came was not the kind of dream a tired man running for his life would expect. He saw a ladder whose foot was on the earth and whose top reached to heaven. The angels of God were going up and going down on it. And the Lord stood above it and spoke.

Jacob's Ladder as Prophecy of Four Exiles

The rabbis who inherited this dream read it as a vision of history. The angels going up and coming down were not messengers on routine celestial business. They were the guardian angels of the four great empires: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Each one climbed the ladder in turn. Jacob watched the angel of Babylon go up seventy rungs and come back down. He watched the angel of Persia go up fifty-two rungs and come back down. He watched the angel of Greece go up one hundred and eighty rungs and come back down.

Then the angel of Rome began to climb and Jacob lost count. The angel climbed and climbed and showed no sign of coming down, and Jacob was afraid. God told him: do not be afraid. If he climbs all the way to heaven, I will bring him down. The empires will end. Israel will outlast them all.

The Land That Was Made for the People

A Greek observer writing around 200 BCE described Judea's farmland with the eye of a practical diplomat: the soil is thickly planted with multitudes of olive trees, with crops of corn and pulse, with vines, and there is abundance of honey. He was describing agricultural productivity. He was noting what a well-organized land with good soil could produce.

But the ancient calendar that governed that land was not a practical convenience for farmers. The sabbatical year that let the land rest every seventh year, the jubilee that returned holdings to their original tribal assignments every fifty years, the agricultural festivals that tied the harvest cycle to the covenant festivals, all of this was architecture, not just law. It was the structure of a land that had been matched to its inhabitants from before the creation of the world, the way the rabbis read Jacob's ladder: a vision of the empires that would try to own this land and would fail, one by one, while the people who were made for it went down into exile and came back up.

What Jacob Understood When He Woke

He woke up and said: the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. He was afraid and he said: this is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven. He took the stone he had slept on and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on it and called the place Bethel, the house of God.

He had not yet been given the land. He was running north with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. But the dream had told him what the stone he was sleeping on was made of: the ground of the land that had been prepared for him and his descendants before any empire existed to claim it, before any angel had climbed the first rung of the ladder that Jacob had just watched in the night above his sleeping head.