The story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-22) is a marvel of concise storytelling. In the space of just 13 verses, it satirizes not just one ancient holy place but two. It speaks hope and purpose to the scattered people of God. It lays out in brief a theology of election. It allows Jacob to make a fool himself. And, despite the name usually given to the passage, it does it all without a ladder. 

More on the ladder in a moment, but let me explain how and why I’ve come to this passage for this post. Lately, in an effort to better understand how the Bible functions in the church—not just how it’s supposed to function but how it actually functions—I have been reading in and about some of the early church fathers, in particular the brilliant Origen of Alexandria (c. 185-253). I hope to have more to say about that in future posts.

But before turning in subsequent posts to how the Bible is used for good or ill in the church, whether it’s the church of long ago or the church of today, it’s important to let the Bible itself have its own say. Too often preachers fail to fully appreciate the literary skill of the biblical writers. They are so eager to get to their theological or moral points that they miss what the writers are up to. One might contrast, in this regard, Marilynne Robinson’s literary and theological appreciation of Genesis (Reading Genesis, 2024; for my review of the book, see the Reformed Journal website) with any of the usual biblical commentaries. Robinson, a consummate writer of narrative herself, sees what the commentators fail to see.

But let’s return to the story. As the narrative opens, Jacob is in full flight from Beersheba to Harran, having stolen the firstborn blessing from his brother Esau (Genesis 27). Or so he thinks and, perhaps more importantly, so Esau thinks, although the story seems to make it clear that blessings are not the sort of things that one can steal. On his journey, he stops for the night “in a place.” The place, notably, is not named at this point in the narrative where it typically would be named. Not yet. By not naming the place, the writer signals to us to pay attention: this place of no name will be important in the story. When these writers don’t tell you something, it’s a signal. Something is going on here.  

So too with the rocks. Scattered about this place are rocks—large rocks. As Jacob settles down for the night, he takes one of them and places it at his head. The translations will tell you that he places it under his head, but nowhere in the text does “under” appear, and in any case, rocks make poor pillows. It’s more likely that Jacob places a large stone at his head for protection against someone sneaking up on him from behind in the night than that Jacob takes a rock for a pillow. The rock is another signal: pay attention; this rock will appear again. 

With the rock at his head, Jacob falls asleep and into a dream. The imagery of the dream is all Babylonian: a ziggurat, a staircase temple, not a ladder, rising from the ground where Jacob lies to touch the sky. “Touch the sky” is the stuff of Babylonian temple inscriptions. In these inscriptions temples are said to reach to the sky. On this stairway, like so many celestial priests, are the messengers of Yhwh ascending and descending from earth to sky.

It should not escape us that there was such a temple in the city of Babylon. It was known as Etemenanki, Sumerian for something like “house fixed between earth and sky.” Etemenanki was a disaster as temples go. It was originally built late in the 2nd millennium BCE and built badly, with mud bricks that had not been properly baked. In the late Assyrian period, they tried to repair Etemenanki by cladding it with baked bricks, but to little avail. Eventually, the site was cleared by Alexander the Great. 

The Tower of Babel story is based on Etemenanki. That text (Genesis 11) takes an exile’s delight in mocking the pretensions of the tower. But here, in the Jacob story, the imagery serves a different purpose: it suggests that Yhwh needs no mud brick tower stairway. Yhwh’s Etemenanki, “Earth to Heaven Tower,” is wherever Yhwh is, and Yhwh is wherever Yhwh’s people are. Even when they are in “no place” Yhwh’s temple is there. In the New Testament, Jesus makes the same point in his conversation with the woman at the well (John 4). She asks where? Where should we worship? Jerusalem or Gerizim? Jesus says neither (and both): “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth” (4:24).

To reinforce the imagery, Yhwh speaks from the top of the tower. He speaks first the promise that holds together these ancestor stories in Genesis: 

I am Yhwh, God of Abraham your father and God of Isaac. The land where you now lie, I give you to you and your descendants. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and they will spread west and east, north and south, and all the clans of the land will be blessed by [or “in”] you and your descendants. (28:13-14)

These words are addressed to the exilic diaspora. They contain in brief the fundamental elements of the theology of election: the Jacob people are chosen for a purpose, that purpose being the blessing of all the clans of the earth. They are to be a people of witness, represented here in the solitary figure of Jacob. They are such not because they are better than others but simply because they have been so chosen. In fact, Yhwh seems to prefer the roguishness of Jacob over the essential goodness of Esau (see chapter 33). But this is to miss the point: Yhwh chooses Jacob not just for Jacob’s sake but for Esau’s sake. Chosenness is not a zero-sum divine game.

To all that Yhwh adds another promise: the promise of return. Again speaking not only to Jacob but to the exilic diaspora, Yhwh says:

Look, I am with you. I will protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land; I will not leave you before I have done what I said to you. (28:15)

And with that, the fun begins. Jacob wakes up. And he gets it all wrong. If the imagery of the dream and what Yhwh says in it together make the point that Yhwh is a god of people, not of place,  Jacob declares the opposite. On waking, he says (reading the Hebrew literally):

Surely there is a Yhwh in this place, and I was not aware!

The notion in what Jacob says, common to ancient religions, is that there were local manifestations of gods, including local manifestations of Yhwh (on this see the brilliant study by Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, 2009, especially page 29 and note 131). Such manifestations were often marked with standing stones, maṣṣēbōt, which is where Jacob’s mind will soon go, but first, the place needs a name. Or two.

Jacob was afraid and so he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than a house of God and a gate of heaven.”

With this, Jacob invokes two holy places: Bethel, which shortly will be the name Jacob gives to the place, and Babylon. Suggests them but does not quite name them. For “house of God,” it’s bêt ʾĕlōhîm, with the longer form of “god,” rather than bêt-ʾēl. And for Babylon, “gate of the gods,” it’s “gate of heaven.” It’s all quite wink, wink. 

The writers are poking, jabbing not only at Jacob, but at Bethel and Babylon. The ancient shrine of Bethel was notorious in antiquity for its golden bull image of Yhwh (1 Kings 12:26-30); Babylon, of course, was notoriously Babylon, the city which regarded itself as the religious and cultural capital of the world. What if both of these are imposters? What if Jacob got it all wrong? What if Bethel was no holy place at all? And what if Babylon, for all its pretension to be the center of the universe, was just the site of a poorly-made mud brick facsimile of the true stairway to the sky?

With that, let’s finish it out. Jacob takes the rock that he put behind his head and sets it up to be a maṣṣēbâ, a standing pillar in which a local god was thought to reside. He anoints it with oil and names the place Bethel, “house of God.” And with his religious duties attended to, he takes a vow, a vow of such monumental chutzpah, it takes one’s breath away:

If Yhwh God is with me, and if he protects me on this road which I am traveling, and if he gives to me food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return in peace to the house of my father, then Yhwh will be my God. And this stone that I have set up as a maṣṣēbâ of Yhwh will be a house for God, and of all that is given to me, I will give a tenth to you. (28:2-22)

This is the religion of if contrasted with the religion of is. When Yhwh speaks to Jacob, he says simply what is: you will be the ancestor of a great nation, a nation that will spread out across the earth, and where it goes, my name and blessing will go. In contrast, Jacob speaks of if: If Yhwh God is with me, and if, and if, and if, then Yhwh will be my God. Jacob seems to be saying in his overfamiliar speech, “Do all this, and you will be my guy.”

The religion of if is the religion we meet in the health and wealth gospel. Take a bet on God. The religion of is the faith that confronts us with our chosenness. In the perversion of election theology too often taught in Reformation churches, the question becomes: am I chosen or not. But this is never the way the idea of chosenness works in the Bible. In the Bible, the question is not whether you are chosen—if you have considered the question, you are—but what to do with your chosenness. What does your chosenness require of you? How can you best respond to the remarkable fact of your chosenness. The rest of the Jacob story works out answers to those questions.

But let the theology of this remarkable story go for a moment. Ponder the way in the story Jacob gets everything wrong. Ponder this as a story of our spiritual ancestor. The story is a caution. It asks of us as of its first readers: have we misheard God? 

Hearing God and religion are not the same thing. Note that everything Jacob does when he wakes up is religious: he declares himself to be in the presence of God. He is properly reverent, fearful, filled with awe. He declares the place where he stands to be a holy place, a rent in the universe through which the glory of God streams in. He sets up a sacramental monument. And he takes a solemn vow, promising (if it all works out) to support the future shrine with his tithe. But for all that it’s the religion of self-interest. It’s not the voice of God Jacob hears but the voice of his own desires. 

In this story, so gently and subtly told, we are cautioned to wake up from our religious dreams and hear the word of God. And if we are to hear the word of God, we have to pay attention to the art of these writers, to the playfulness of their storytelling, to the way they turn things over and then turn them over again, to the ways that they make a story into a question, and in the question, require us to rethink our lives. 

To return to where I started, what’s too often lost in the long conversation in the church about how the Bible should be read is the artfulness of these long lost writers, their delight in the words, their humor, and their wisdom. It’s this I would like to recommend to all those for whom the Bible no longer speaks. Try it again, but read it not through the eyes of theologians but through the eyes of these ancient writers—writers from whom we can and should still learn.

Clay