Jacob Dreamed the Golden Idol Before the Land Was His

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The Night He Ran Out of Country

Jacob went out from Beersheba with his brother's threat behind him and nothing ahead but the road north. The sun went down early on him. He stopped where he was because there was nowhere else to stop, took stones off the ground, put them under his head, and lay down in the open.

Everything about that night carried the shape of a later disaster. He went out, the way his children would one day be sent out from God's presence. He went toward Haran, and the letters of that name sit inside the phrase for the day of God's burning anger. He put his head on stones, and the sacred stones of Jerusalem would one day be spilled at the head of every street.

Then he dreamed, and what he saw standing on the earth with its top in the heavens was not a ladder.

The Thing Set Up in the Valley of Dura

It was gold, and it was sixty cubits high and six cubits wide, and it had been raised on the flat plain of Dura in the province of Babylon by a king who wanted the whole administration on its knees in front of it.

Herald, horn, pipe, harp. Everyone in the empire was to go down when the music started. The statue did not need to move to do its work. It only had to stand there while the provinces filed past it.

Jacob was asleep on a rock in Canaan, generations early, watching it.

The Three Who Danced in Front of It

The figures going up and down in front of the gold were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

They raised the king's honor and they lowered it in the same motion. They danced and leapt in front of him, they gave the throne everything a throne could ask for in taxes and service, and where the statue was concerned they gave him nothing at all.

Then they said it in the open, in front of the court, with the furnace already heating.

"Let it be known to you, king, that we will not serve your gods, and we will not bow down to the golden image you have set up."

The Lord was standing over the whole scene. When the door of the furnace was opened, the voice that called into the fire used their titles and not the king's. "Servants of God Most High, come out."

They walked out of it.

Daniel and the Thing That Swallowed Everything

The king kept a serpent, and it ate whatever was thrown to it. Nothing came back out. He liked to show it off.

"Look at its strength," he said to Daniel. "It swallows everything put in front of it."

"Give me permission," Daniel said, "and I will finish it."

He got the permission. He took straw, worked nails down inside the bundle where nothing showed, and threw it to the serpent, and the serpent took it the way it took everything else. The nails went through its insides.

What Babylon had swallowed came back out of its mouth.

The Stone He Stood Up at Bethel

Jacob woke on the ground with the taste of all of it still in him.

"The Lord is in this place," he said, "and I did not know it." Then the fear caught up with him. "This is nothing other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven."

He took the stone he had slept on and stood it upright and poured oil over the top of it and gave the place a name.

He owned none of the ground he was standing on. The land was still ahead of him, and so was the wife, and the flocks, and the limp he would come back with. What he had that morning was a stone with oil running down it and the certainty that empires would set up statues on that land and that his descendants would be standing in front of them, refusing, and would walk out of the fire on their own feet.

The count of the seasons was older than any of it. Seedtime, harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter. Adam had handed the reckoning to Enoch, and Enoch handed it to Noah, and it went on running under every kingdom that ever thought it owned the year.

Jacob picked up his bag and walked north.