Notes 33: Gateway to heaven (28:10-22)

SYNOPSIS: Stopping along the way at sunset, Jacob places a stone under his head, goes to sleep and has a dream in which he sees stairs leading up to heaven. God speaks to Jacob in the dream and makes the usual promises: his descendants will be many and spread far and wide; God will protect him always and will not abandon him until this is done. Jacob awakes and is much moved by the thought that he has spent the night at the gateway to heaven. In the morning he sets up the stone as a pillar, and calls the place the House of God (Bet-El). Jacob then makes a solemn promise of his own: to keep faith with God and pay back a tenth of everything he receives.

• Text of the passage

28:11 wayyifga‛ bammaqom
The H text actually says that Jacob 'reached the place' although all the translations render it as '...a certain place.' The primary meaning of maqom is the general one of 'place'; although in context is sometimes seems to tend to refer to a holy place such as a sanctuary. In the present scene, when Jacob arrives there it is, to him, merely a place; in the course of the story, it becomes a special place, and it is considered reasonably probable that it ended up, in reality, being a recognised sanctuary of some kind. If so, that was the reality known to the narrators and their audience, and the anecodote here related can therefore be viewed as an etiology explaining the origin of said sanctuary. If so, again (and this is admittedly a longish chain of 'if so's), then perhaps the story told here originated from said sanctuary as its local legend, telling not only the origin of its sacred status but, just possibly, the reason why the descendants of Jacob (the Israelites) were expected to pay tithes to it.

28:12 wayyaxalom w'hinne sullam
There seems to be no sure way to resolve whether sullam means a ladder or a staircase. Speiser points out, pragmatically, that it is very difficult to really imagine numerous angels all going up and down a ladder (unless they took turns, I suppose). I would add that it also seems less dignified. Speiser also suggests that the prototype for this image might have been a Mesopotamian ziggurat, and argues the point that this would fit better with the description of it in v. 17 as a gateway to heaven than if it were some kind of ladder.

mal'akhe elohim
Here as practically always in Genesis, God's mal'akhim 'messengers' appear in the story in passing but rarely stay around for long, and little is known for certain about how they are conceptualized by the narrator or the earliest audiences. The fact that we generally speak of them in English as angels is, or originally was, merely because angelos is the Greek word for messenger. In the present story, their role is limited to going up and down the stairs between earth and heaven - perhaps a meaningful enough image - and other than that they don't say anything, do anything or otherwise participate in the scene.

28:13 w'hinne YHWH nittzav ‛alaw
Once again, in the phrase nittzav ‛alaw we are forced, in translation, to decide whether we are going to understand the preposition ‛al in its primary sense of 'on, over' (God was standing over Jacob?), or in its common secondary spatial sense of 'near, by, next to' (God was standing next to Jacob?). In such contexts, I believe that even if both meanings are potentially possible, the latter sense is, in practice, the default one because it is just more neutral in terms of how people usually stand in relation to each other. There is a further potential ambiguity in that the prominal part of ‛alaw could potentially refer not to Jacob but to the sullam, the stairway or ladder; and again, he might be on, above or next to it.

ani YHWH elohe avraham etc.
This way of beginning his promise to Jacob, 'I am YHWH the God of Abraham...', is reminiscent of God's preamble to Abraham which commences (15:7): ani YHWH asher hotzetíkha me'ur kasdim 'I am YHWH who brought you out of Ur-Kasdim...' (see my notes there). Apparently this is God's habitual way of starting such speeches. But where these preambles are addressed to patriarchs, we notice a logical progression from generation to generation: if to Isaac, he is YHWH the God of his father Abraham, to Jacob he is YHWH the God of Abraham and Isaac. Speiser proposes that these should not be translated 'I am YHWH the God of etc.' but 'I YHWH am the God of etc.'; since the am is absent from the H, we might place it in either place in translation, but I rather think it is a moot point where the meaning of the H is concerned, as what is in question is merely a matter of emphasis and one which is really absent from the original. Should it worry us that the present verse says elohe avraham avíkha welohe yitzxaq rather than elohe avraham welohe yitzxaq avíkha? Probably not, given that there is no dedicated term in Genesis for just 'grandfather', and av may refer to any male ancestor. Nonetheless, the choice of wording does seem to push Isaac to the sidelines a bit!

ha'áretz asher atta shokhev ‛aléha l'kha ett'nénna
If timing has any significance, then it is indeed a tiny bit ironic that, as EH points out, this promise of ownership of the land where Jacob is lying is made just as he is about to abandon it for an extended period of time!
 
ul'zar‛ékha
'And to your seed/descendants.' The frequent repetition of such stipulations would naturally be of particular interest to later generations of the children of Israel! Here it echoes God's promise to Abraham in 13:15, even down to similar wording: l'kha ett'nénna ul'zar‛kha ‛ad ‛olam 'to you I will give it and to your seed forever.' The "seed issue" is reiterated very thoroughly in v. 14.

28:15 w'hinne anokhi ‛immakh
God's assurances to be with one of the patriarchs always seem to come when they are about to move to a different place. In 26:3 God assures Isaac: gur ba'áretz hazzot w'ehye ‛imm'kha 'Reside in this land and I will be with you.' Now he tells Jacob 'I will be with you' when he is about to embark on his journey to Paddan-Aram. In 33:3 God will appear to Jacob twenty years later to tell him to return to Canaan and say: shuv el éretz avotékha ul'moladtékha w'ehye ‛immakh 'Return to the land of your fathers and your birth, and I will be with you.' Finally, when the elderly Jacob is about to move down to Egypt with his sons, God appears to him one more time and assures him (46:4): anokhi ered ‛imm'kha mitzráyma 'I will go down with you to Egypt'. It is as if we are seeing the "portable God" (either an archaic precursor or an anthropomorphic metaphor of the omnipresent God) replacing the even more archaic, pagan idea of the local god rooted to a geographical location; the God of the patriarchs has the ability to go anywhere they go, which may have been remarkable to some in the patriarchs' time. Today, on the contrary, when we are accustomed to a God who is everywhere all the time, what strikes us as odd is the suggestion that God needs to go down to Egypt in order to be there with Jacob, since we assume he is already there!