The Flavor of One's Own Medicine

When we last left Jacob, he was in the place he called Bethel, 'House of God,' where he'd undertaken a vow in the wake of a remarkable vision: a stairway for angels between earth and heaven, and the LORD was there to make promises to be with Jacob to guard, support, and prosper him till his homecoming and to multiply his seed and make them a blessing to all families of the earth (Genesis 28:10-22). Now, with a spring in his step, Jacob lifted his legs and sped off toward the north, past Damascus, through the kingdom of Qatna, into the lands of Yamhad, crossing the Euphrates to “the land of the sons of the east” (Genesis 29:1), confident all the way.

How he navigated all these places he'd never been without once in his life having seen a map, I can't begin to imagine. But after weeks of travel, he comes one day to a stop at a well in the open field, surrounded by three men with flocks and capped with a big stone to keep the water free from dust, stop people from falling in, and regulate the use of the precious water within (Genesis 29:2-3).¹ Jacob thrusts his staff in the earth, his robes flowing in the breeze, and strikes up a conversation with the men, learning quickly they're from his destination, his mom's hometown of Harran, just a half-mile to the southeast.² What a coincidence – and Laban's daughter Rachel, Jacob's cousin, just whom he's come to seek, is on the way with the family sheep (Genesis 29:4-6).

Hoping to talk with her alone, Jacob points out that it's a silly time to have all the flocks just standing around a closed well; open it, water them, and take them back out to pasture (Genesis 29:7)! Annoyed at the implied critique of their laziness, the men shoot back that the stone's weight and local custom alike mean that only when all the flocks assemble can the shepherds together move the stone cap off the well to water the sheep (Genesis 29:8). As they argue, who should arrive but Rachel (Genesis 29:9)? Just as, many decades back, Rebekah had spent hours charitably hauling water from a well for Abraham's camels (Genesis 24:28), Jacob wants to do the same for her brother's sheep – so, adrenaline pumping, Jacob approaches the well, and, “with help from on high,” he “succeeded in doing what they could not.”³ The same hands that weeks ago raised up a stone to stand at Bethel now rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well (Genesis 29:10) – a miracle of God!⁴ But, unlike Abraham's steward, Jacob offers no word of thanksgiving, no acknowledgment of the LORD.⁵

Adding to this manly strength a show of chivalry, Jacob hauls up water only for the sheep brought by Rachel. Jacob proves “doubly indifferent to law and custom.”⁶ Jacob, whose last kiss was Isaac while deceiving him (Genesis 27:27), now kisses Rachel and, as from Bethel he'd lifted up his legs and walked, now he closes his journey by lifting up his voice and weeping (Genesis 29:11).⁷ Rachel is, after all, “his first reminder of home and the warm feeling of a secure environment.”⁸ Jacob explains who he is, and, like her Aunt Rebekah who ran home to tell mom all about Abraham's steward, Rachel runs home to tell dad all about Rebekah's son (Genesis 29:12) – or maybe she runs from the stranger who kissed her and started crying.⁹

The last time we saw Laban, he'd run to find Abraham's steward, but only after seeing the shiny gifts he'd given Rebekah (Genesis 24:29-30). Now, hearing that Rebekah's son was nearby, Laban runs once more – no doubt expecting a second haul of treasure. Old Laban throws his arms around Jacob, kisses him like a prodigal son come home, and leads him back to the house where Rebekah grew up (Genesis 29:13). As Rebekah once “told her mother's household about all these things” (Genesis 24:28), Jacob “recounted to Laban all these things” (Genesis 29:14). I wonder, did Jacob lay out the prophecy before his birth? His trade of stew for his brother's birthright? His trickery of Isaac at Rebekah's behest? His hasty escape, his dream at Bethel, his promises from God? Laban's response, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh” (Genesis 29:14), means at least their kinship by blood – but, we wonder, if Laban heard what a trickster Jacob had been, does he see a kinship in character?¹⁰

Jacob resides with Laban “a moon of days,” a big deal in the moon-god's city Harran, no doubt, and Laban can see that Jacob's a gifted shepherd with strength and grit, but also that he came empty-handed, unburdened by the gold and silver and fine fabrics Laban would've hoped. Jacob, meanwhile, learns that, while he'd been told to get a wife from “the daughters of Laban your mother's brother” (Genesis 28:2), he's got two options to choose from (Genesis 29:16). Rachel's the younger of two, just as Jacob's the younger of Rebekah's sons. But there's a 'bigger' sister, Leah – just as the stone blocking the well was 'big.'¹¹ Laban named both like livestock: Rachel's name means a female sheep, while Leah's name means a cow.¹² Leah... well, her eyes are soft, tender. We can't decide whether they were her one bad feature, her one good feature, or whether she was “devoid of beauty.”¹³ Rachel, on the other hand... she's a Middle Eastern Marilyn Monroe (Genesis 29:17). Jacob's head over heels.

At the end of the month, Laban takes his nephew aside. Laban isn't content with Jacob's freedom to leave as he pleases; he's too useful. Laban's words can be taken several ways, but he effectively denies their kinship and presses Jacob to become a contract worker: “Are you my brother, that you should serve me for free? Tell me, what will be your wages?” (Genesis 29:15).¹⁴ Here's the moment when we shift from family to commerce, and also when we introduce the word 'serve,' which shows up seven times exactly, suggesting Jacob's entering into “a dark night of slavery, a foreshadow of Israel in Egypt.”¹⁵ Jacob answers keenly that, for seven years of labor, he'd like to be paid with the younger of Laban's girls, Rachel, as his wife (Genesis 29:18). There's no other kind of bride-price Jacob could offer, and we know of such contracts in their world.¹⁶ Seven years is a steep price.¹⁷

Laban answers that “it's better I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me” (Genesis 29:19) – Laban doesn't explicitly say yes, and avoids mentioning 'her' name.¹⁸ But the Jacob who once made Esau swear oaths is now so love-struck that he takes Laban's hints as if graven in tablets of stone.¹⁹ For the next seven years, he serves as a hired shepherd over Laban's flock (Genesis 29:20). Rebekah had assured him he'd be there just “a few days” while Esau's anger cooled (Genesis 27:43-44), and in Jacob's eyes they were just that, “a few days,” since he's smitten with infatuation for Rachel,²⁰ who as a shepherdess would've been his co-worker this whole time, letting them bond over being the less-favored children of their fathers.²¹ Plus, “it is not onerous to weary for the sake of love, even though deferral brings pain,” as a wise man once said.²²

Seven years go by. Laban seems in no hurry to notify Jacob their contract is up. Jacob rather testily approaches Laban, noting that he's put in his time, so “give me my wife..., that I may go in to her” (Genesis 29:21). Jacob's been mighty patient over his many decades as a bachelor, and he's ready for marriage with all its perks. We get no verbal answer from Laban, only that he gathers the townsfolk together for a party. Wedding feasts lasted a full week, doubling as a kind of honeymoon for the couple (Genesis 29:22). The first day's festivities kick off with eating and drinking, and after night's fallen on the tipsy groom, Laban leads the veiled bride to his dark tent. He welcomes her in (Genesis 29:23). In the pitch-black, he lifts away her veil, leads her to bed, and does with her what you might imagine on a wedding night, thereafter falling asleep contented and madly in love.

Dawn's rays begin to stir his eyes. As he slowly wakes and sobers, he rolls to his side to see his darling Rachel. But she isn't there. In her place, like a stone unexpectedly capping a well, is her sister. “In the morning, behold – it was Leah!” (Genesis 29:25). For all Rachel's superior beauty, Jacob couldn't tell the difference, “for where is visible beauty in the dark?”²³ “Laban's deceit was unmasked to Jacob,”²⁴ and in fury he stormed out and went after Laban. The words Jacob spits at his devious uncle are familiar, if we remember how Abraham was caught by Pharaoh pretending that his wife was his sister (Genesis 12:18); now, when Laban pretends a sister is a wife, Jacob echoes the befuddled outrage of the pagan king: “What is this you have done to me?”²⁵ Jacob protests that this wasn't the deal (he thought) they had, so “why, then, did you defraud me?” (Genesis 29:25).

In that very question, Jacob sets himself up to fall. Not only does the word 'defraud' sound in Hebrew a lot like 'Aramean,' which is what Laban is, but it's from the same root as the word Isaac used to explain to Esau how Jacob “came with fraud and has taken away your blessing” (Genesis 27:35).²⁶ Laban's self-serving reply, going on the offensive to shift blame to Jacob, unwittingly hammers the point home: “It is not done thus in our place to give the littler one before the firstborn” (Genesis 29:26). Jacob can't miss the subtext. He's on the run since his mom Rebekah orchestrated a plan whereby Jacob would exploit Isaac's loss of sight by disguising a younger brother and sending him into the tent in the firstborn's place (Genesis 27:6-10); now, Rebekah's brother has just orchestrated a plan whereby soft-eyed Leah would exploit Jacob's impediments to sight by disguising a firstborn sister and sending her into the tent in the younger one's place. Here in civilized parts, says Laban with a tone of sharp disapproval of Jacob's custom-bending ways, it just isn't okay to pass by the rights of the firstborn.²⁷ The Jacob who'd schemed so to swipe the birthright from his family can't get around Leah's birthright in hers.²⁸

Jacob, that fraudster extraordinaire, has – for the first time in his life – found himself on the other side of things. “His cunning has been matched, its ugliness exposed” like a monster first beholding his reflection.²⁹ How could this happen to Jacob? Didn't God promise to be with him? Yes, absolutely. God's protection is over Jacob. But Jacob's experiences will still be shaped by his past character and conduct, and the same God who protects him is also determined to lead him through the consequences of who he's been. Jacob finally “experiences what both Esau and Isaac had experienced before him” at his own hands; and, however angry Jacob may now be, he can't escape the bitter fact that “when Jacob looks at Laban, he sees himself.”³⁰

While Jacob takes it all in, Laban lays out a proposal. In light of the fraud, Jacob could leave in the middle of the wedding feast, saying, “Take your daughter, and I will go, because you have done evil against me.”³¹ He'd leave in shame and poverty, without fulfilling his father's charge, and never see Rachel again. Lose-lose. Or, Laban suggests, Jacob can finish the wedding week for Leah, accepting her as his lawful wife after the fact;³² and Jacob can renew his contract with Laban for another term, “and we will give you also this one, for the service you serve with me still seven years further” (Genesis 29:27). Laban will let him have Rachel at the end of this week, saving on a second banquet down the line, while securing Jacob's lucrative services for seven more years and delaying his daughter's departure to distant Canaan where his sister was led away.³³

Resentful but defeated, Jacob silently complies. He finishes his wedding week with Leah, receives Rachel as a second wife, and begins yet another seven-year term in servitude to Laban (Genesis 29:28-30). Isaac had once blessed Jacob to be “master over your brothers,” a man whom many peoples would “serve” (Genesis 27:29) – “All his brothers I have given to him as servants,” said Isaac (Genesis 27:37) – yet here, against the grain of the blessing, Jacob is for seven more years a servant under his 'brother' Laban.³⁴ These seven don't fly by.

The Law of Moses, yet future, will forbid any man to “take a woman as a rival wife to her sister” (Leviticus 18:18), and the turmoil of Jacob's accidentally polygamous household shows why. He's become the husband of two sisters, and just as his parents played favorites with him and his brother (Genesis 25:28), Jacob can't help but have a favorite wife: Rachel, the second one. But while we've heard how Jacob loves Rachel, we actually haven't been told how she feels about him.³⁵ Leah, on the other hand, longed for him, perhaps loved him.³⁶ Yet, though Jacob might understand from experience that Leah was just following Laban's orders as he'd had to obey Rebekah, he clearly resents her and doesn't feel warmly about her; he would've never married her uncoerced. It has all the drama of a soap opera, this love triangle between Jacob and his two sister-wives.

Only now do we hear the name of God read out for the first time since Jacob reached Harran: “The LORD saw that Leah was hated” – whether actively despised or just not favored is unclear (cf. Deuteronomy 21:15)³⁷ – but now, in her emotional affliction and isolation, God has compassion on this firstborn sister. As is his prerogative – “it is the Creator of all who manages all things, awaking even nature itself to childbirth”³⁸ – God opens Leah's womb but not Rachel's, balancing Rachel's favor by Leah's fertility (Genesis 29:31). Then, as it turns out, “each woman wants what the other has.”³⁹ Leah, gifted with children, just wants to be the wife who has Jacob's love and favor; Rachel, gifted with Jacob's love and favor, just wants to be mother of many children.⁴⁰

The next few verses list four sons whom Leah conceives and bears in sequence over the first several years, and there's a real tragic quality to them, as Leah works through her longings. Jacob and Leah's firstborn is Reuben, for “the LORD has looked upon my affliction, for now my husband will love me,” she hopes. When that doesn't pan out, Simeon is born, for “the LORD has heard that I am hated.” When Levi's born, Leah wishes that “now this time my husband will be attached to me, since I have borne him three sons.” She's driven, all this time, “to win the love of her husband,”⁴¹ and yet Jacob remains stubbornly “completely disposed towards Rachel.”⁴² Yet when she names her fourth son Judah, all reference to Jacob has dropped away: “This time I will praise the LORD” (Genesis 29:32-35). Her progression is from sight to hearing to attachment to praise.⁴³ And remarkably, given that she and her sister had so recently been “ignorant of religious truth, the daughters of a pagan,”⁴⁴ she gives glory “not to the gods of Laban” but to the God of Jacob's family,⁴⁵ the same God who earlier saw and heard Hagar in her affliction and abandonment (Genesis 16:11-13).

In the meantime, while the LORD saw how Leah was hated, Rachel comes after a year or two to see that she herself is barren, falling short of her big sister who's become a mom. So Rachel “envied her sister” (Genesis 30:1). This is just the second time we've read of envy, after the Philistines “envied” Isaac for his prosperity in their land (Genesis 26:14). Lovely Rachel has Philistine eyes for her tender-eyed sister. So Rachel approaches Jacob and, much as Jacob had demanded Laban turn over the wife who'd been promised, Rachel shockingly blurts out, “Give me sons – and, if not, I shall die!” (Genesis 30:1).⁴⁶ Not only does she share Aunt Rebekah's and Cousin Esau's flair for the dramatic, but she's demanding of Jacob something beyond his power, unlike his demands of Laban. Children aren't a thing that can be promised, only a gift that can be welcomed.

But, as one old saint remarked, “A terrible evil is jealousy: it induces stupidity.”⁴⁷ While we empathize deeply with Rachel's pain, we can't help but contrast her quick lashing out to the gracious sufferings of Sarah and of Rebekah over decades, and in light of her impetuous foot-stomping, we begin to wonder a bit whether Rachel's beauty is more than skin-deep. She's the younger sister; is she also the immature sister? “Jacob loved Rachel more,” someone put it, “but was Rachel more lovable?”⁴⁸

Jacob, whose love for her is the wind beneath his wings, now for the first time snaps back at her, frustrated by her blame for him and disappointed by her muddled faith. “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2). It's the first time we've heard Jacob address either of his wives, and the first thing Jacob's said since his humbling realization that he isn't the smartest and cleverest man in Harran. For maybe the first time in his life, Jacob admits his limitations, confesses that he and his household are reliant entirely on the will of God.⁴⁹ Rachel's infertility is one stone Jacob doesn't have strength in him to roll away.⁵⁰ But even if Jacob seems to be learning, he doesn't imitate his father who began praying for Rebekah's plight; he doesn't seek the help of the One who can roll away the stone (Genesis 25:21).⁵¹

Rachel is neither humbled by his rebuke nor dissuaded by his apparent indifference. She devises the same plan Sarah thought up fourteen chapters back. She and Leah had both received, as their dowry, one each of Laban's maidservants as their own (Genesis 29:24, 29). Now, Rachel puts the services of hers, Bilhah, on the table, as Sarah had with Hagar, offering Bilhah as a concubine-wife to Jacob (Genesis 30:3-4). Rachel's dream is to “be built up through her” (Genesis 30:3; cf. 16:2), establishing a Rachel bloc within the growing Jacob household.⁵² And “to console her, he did not refuse her request.”⁵³ Bilhah bears Jacob exactly two sons, whom Rachel calls Dan and Naphtali. Where Leah's naming pointed to 'the LORD,' Rachel only references 'God.' Her declarations over these kids are edgier; she sees them as means to an end: victory over her sister (Genesis 30:5-8).

Meanwhile, Leah had stopped having children after her four sons (Genesis 29:35); but now, seeing Rachel's gambit and hearing her taunts, Leah stoops to the same level, exchanging her former solidarity with Hagar to become another Sarah. With no pressing need other than to rebut her little sister's gloating, Leah shoves forth her own maidservant Zilpah – who, in some Jewish traditions, was Bilhah's sister⁵⁴ – into the mix (Genesis 30:9). Jacob again accepts, “lest he grieve Leah and cause a schism between the sisters” to grow ever wider.⁵⁵ Zilpah, like Bilhah, bears exactly two sons for Jacob, making a second set of four; but this time, Leah's accounts for their names are totally pagan and secular, referring to neither the LORD nor Jacob at all.⁵⁶ The first is Gad, named for the Aramean god of good luck; the second is Asher, meaning to go straight or be happy and fortunate (Genesis 30:12-13). Leah doesn't directly reference her sister in either name, but implicitly exalts herself; the two are now mutually locked in a “fight for domestic supremacy” over each other.⁵⁷ And the man who dueled his brother from the womb has been rewarded by living with two sisters whose wombs are at war.⁵⁸

Suddenly, a story interrupts. It's May, time for the wheat harvest, and little Reuben has toddled out to the fields, where he founds some pretty flowers with their twisty roots and tiny fruits, and he brought them back to mom. These were mandrakes, which in Hebrew sound something like 'love-fruits,' since the resemblance of their roots to a couple embracing prompted people to use them as aphrodisiacs or as fertility enhancers (neither of which they actually do, though they can poison you and make you hallucinate).⁵⁹ But both sisters would believe they'd have a use for them – Leah, to entice Jacob; Rachel, to boost her chances of conception.

When Leah receives these mandrakes from young Reuben, Rachel approaches and, with an air of pleading, asks for a share – and now Leah's pent-up frustrations come bursting out (Genesis 30:14-15). “Sis, isn't enough that you already stole my husband away from me? And now you've got the audacity to want to take away these mandrakes that my little boy picked for me?” Rachel counters with a suggestion. In exchange for a share of the mandrakes, Rachel will sell something to Leah. What? A night with Jacob, whose attachment to Rachel is what Leah resents and covets most. The deal is struck between the sisters – and it reminds us of a deal between two brothers. Jacob once took advantage of Esau, as he came in exhausted from the field, by selling him vegetables in exchange for a precious birthright (Genesis 25:29-34). Now, Leah takes advantage of her desperate sister by selling her vegetation from the field in exchange for restored access to a precious husband.⁶⁰ In her own way, Rachel “recapitulates Esau's ravenous hunger... for worldly goods” at the expense of what matters more.⁶¹

Now, much as Laban dubbed his daughters livestock to be sold off, the servile Jacob is himself bought and sold,⁶² reduced to “a pawn in other people's conflicts.”⁶³ Coming in from the field as Esau did after a day's hard work (maybe helping with harvest), Leah intercepts him and demands he comply with her contract with Rachel: “You must come in to me, for I have absolutely hired you with the mandrakes of my son” (Genesis 30:16). Leah uses the language of 'come in to me,' as on their wedding nights, but both Rachel and the narrator use different language: “he lay with her that night” (Genesis 30:15-16), a more scandalous phrase familiar from when Lot's daughters intoxicated and raped him (Genesis 19:34-35), and which we never hear of a married couple outside David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12:24). Effectively, Rachel is prostituting Jacob to Leah. This is his lowest point, the direst fruit of the way he's treated family up to now, “one more measure-for-measure punishment.”⁶⁴

Rachel expected that, by trading Jacob to her lately-barren sister for a fertility treatment, she'd be helped. But it doesn't work. Instead, “God heard Leah, and she conceived and bore to Jacob a fifth son” of her own, Issachar (Genesis 30:17). This resumes her marital relations with Jacob, and the next time she gets pregnant, it's with twins, a daughter Dinah and, before her, her last son Zebulun, whose name expresses a continuing hope that Jacob will, if he can't love her as his wife, at least honor her as mother of six of his sons (Genesis 30:19-21).

In the midst of all this, Rachel – having loosened her grip on her husband – finally has her own turn. “And God remembered Rachel,” we read (Genesis 30:22), just as “God remembered Noah” amidst the flood (Genesis 8:1) and “God remembered Abraham” while judging Sodom (Genesis 19:29). Having at last turned his saving attention on the barren beauty, “God heard her and opened her womb, and she conceived and bore a son” after all this (Genesis 30:22-23). Only after Leah's children have all been born, and only once Jacob completes his humbling discipline of seven years of added service for her, can Rachel herself give birth.⁶⁵

This son, Joseph, is the climax of the son sequence recorded here, and Rachel explains his name twice. First, Joseph means that “God has taken away,” subtracted, “my reproach,” since after seven long years, she's no longer Rachel the barren, but Rachel the mother, the status she coveted most. And second, Joseph is her prayer: “May the LORD add to me another son!” (Genesis 30:24). Addition – just as her father added people to make a party, the LORD can add together sons to make a family. Though her saying expresses that more will be needed to satisfy her, this is also the first time the Bible puts the LORD's name on Rachel's lips, suggesting that, whereas Leah has degenerated, Rachel has gained a keener piety before the God of Abraham.

In its broadest strokes, this is a story about how Jacob “receives his comeuppance” for his past character and his prior conduct.⁶⁶ Jacob had lived as a smooth operator, a man determined from birth to get ahead even if it meant drawing his own flesh-and-blood back and tripping them up. In Laban, he meets his match. For deceiving his father Isaac in the dark with a brother switcheroo, he's chastised through being deceived in the dark with a sister switcheroo. For his careful art with words to trap people, he's misled by ambiguities and half-truths. For his quarrelsome sibling rivalry, he's plunged into the middle of two sisters' sibling rivalry over him. For inducing exhausted Esau to sell his invaluable birthright for a mess of pottage, he's himself sold between wives for useless mandrakes. All these things that befall Jacob are calculated responses – calculated beyond the power of Laban or Leah or Rachel or anyone on earth – to the disruptive things Jacob himself has done to others.

The Apostle Paul preached: “Do not be deceived! God is not mocked! For whatever one sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7). He could've been talking about Jacob in Harran. But the sentiment he proclaimed to the Galatians was one he found warned in his Bible. “Those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same,” said Eliphaz to Job (Job 4:8). “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity,” said Solomon (Proverbs 22:8). And the prophet explained: “For they sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). It all adds up to the rule that “people cannot escape the consequences of their own actions.”⁶⁷ That isn't because of some impersonal law of karma, but because of the justice of a very personal God, writing the world with the artistry of an author.

Jacob is under God's watchful eye; Jacob has profound promises and blessings; and yet, for the way he's treated others thus far, he's now reaping things he himself has sown, each fruit matching the species of the seed he's grown it from. It just fits Jacob's trickery in darkness that he be tricked in darkness. It just fits Jacob's crass commercialization of family relationships that he be trapped in the commercialization of his family life. These things hunt him down, because the God who is with him to protect him is also hunting him down. There is no contradiction between the two, because both are dimensions of a greater whole.

We live by grace abounding, and yet the Apostle still says that we sow what we reap. Someone who sows to his own flesh, investing in his or her own impulses, can be sure to reap the decay that naturally follows (Galatians 6:8). We can't be astonished that living by the sword leads to dying by the sword (Matthew 26:52). And even when saved from the deadly penalty, consequences of sin often stick around for us to work through and heal from. In poetic fashion, we live in a world we sculpted. David, though repentant and forgiven over Bathsheba, still paid with the life of their first son (2 Samuel 12:13-14). Call it penance, if you please, or pick a prettier word, but the character-shaping actions we undertake have to be bent back if we're to be made finally whole. That's the costly grace of God. “Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap steadfast love, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the LORD, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you” (Hosea 10:12).

Throughout these experiences of reversal and defeat and shame, “Jacob's character is being tested and refined.”⁶⁸ His smooth curves are being, uncomfortably but needfully, hammered backwards by these chaotic Aramean tools in the hands of his LORD. He's being reshaped into the patriarch he's destined to become; his tendencies are being corrected and redirected so that he can be the man God means for him to be. Taking these tastes of his own medicine will prove to be for Jacob's good health, not for his ruin – and so is it for us.

One of God's promises to Jacob at Bethel was that his seed would burst forth in all directions like the dust of the ground (Genesis 28:14). And this is how God is keeping that promise: through Laban's trickery, through the competition between Leah and Rachel. God isn't endorsing their vices, but he's using them to further his will for Jacob's destiny. By the time Joseph's born, Jacob has more sons than Abraham and Isaac put together. “Jacob's disastrous household is amazingly fruitful, and the promise to Abraham is fulfilled, only because God, the source of life, chooses to bless this family” in all its dysfunction.⁶⁹ There's no picking and choosing required between the children of Jacob. Through Leah and Rachel, and Bilhah and Zilpah, there come to be “multiple children of the promise,” on their way to becoming the 'great nation' promised to the patriarchs (Genesis 12:2).⁷⁰

It's as the people later said: “Rachel and Leah... together built up the house of Israel” (Ruth 4:11). See, while the womb of Rachel would lead to the likes of Joshua, King Saul, and the Apostle Paul, the fruit of Leah's womb will one day encompass the likes of Moses, Aaron, Samuel, David, Solomon, Jeremiah, and our Savior. In the end, each of these women will receive what she wanted most. When Leah dies, she'll be buried in the cave with Abraham and Sarah, with Isaac and Rebekah; there, Jacob will join her, their bones touching through the ages, and we'll see that Leah was “Jacob's full partner in life.”⁷¹ Rachel will be buried “on the way to Ephrath, that is, Bethlehem” (Genesis 35:19), where, when the people are being carried into exile, Jeremiah hails “Rachel weeping for her children” (Jeremiah 31:15), having adopted the whole nation as their mother.⁷² The Lord belays her tears with renewed hope, and when she cries again over the babes of Bethlehem slain on Herod's orders (Matthew 2:16-18), it's only because, so near her bones, Leah's line has revealed Christ.

None of these things was without deeper meaning. To the early Christians, Jacob at the well became a symbol of the Messiah. “He beheld sin lying upon the wellspring of the world..., he beheld the nations like flocks in great thirst..., and, like that stone, he rolled away the heavy weight of sin.”⁷³ Then “the well is called 'baptism,' which was being awaited by the generations and tribes.”⁷⁴ Early Christians from near the beginning took Leah and Rachels as symbols of Synagogue and Church, or Jews and Gentiles, for both of whom Christ had labored hard in service.⁷⁵ They described how Christ loved the whole Church from before creation, but that in the course of time, “Leah, like the Law, entered in secretly,” veiled by Moses, and that Christ wouldn't relent until the reign of grace was fulfilled when he claimed the Church as his own.⁷⁶ They sang, “That beautiful thing which was done was not Jacob's doing, nor was it Laban who invented that great discovery.... God has called all nations into communion with himself.”⁷⁷ It was for this that heavenly hands rolled the stone from the tomb.

What Jacob's twin marriages to Leah and Rachel reveal is this truth, that from two sisters would come a single family, ultimately united despite its fractured and diverse history. Jacob here, though reduced to his lowest for the sake of God's plan for him, shows how Jesus Christ, having emptied himself and taken the form of a servant (Philippians 2:8), “himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” between Leah and Rachel, between her children and her children, “that he might... reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross..., being built together into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:14-22).⁷⁸ God sees us, hears us, joins us to himself – praise God! He justifies us and makes us prevail, luckily sets us straight, rewards us and endows us with eternal blessings; for, having taken all the shame of the world away, he'll at last add us and gather us to the “assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven” (Hebrews 12:23), the “great multitude that no one could number, from every nation,” joined as one and lifting up a loud voice to cry: “Salvation belongs to our God... and to the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9-10)!  Amen.

Stone Pillows and Strange Dreams

His feet ached. This was all a bit much; he didn't like it. But he needed distance from the lethal wrath boiling beneath his brother's skin. It's the third or fourth day since Jacob said his hasty goodbyes to Mom and Dad, and got shipped off to a far and foreign land to save his life and wed a wife. Now Esau was comfy at home with his growing gaggle of wives and kids, while Jacob, 'spite birthright and blessing, was “separated from his family..., wandering off in fear,”¹ “alone in the backcountry... without his flock or sheepdogs to ease the loneliness.”² This was a rather new experience for Jacob, the man who stayed in the comfort of tents, who'd never gone a day in his life without seeing his mom, “who had been reared at home and had never experienced the rigors of travel.”³ Now he traipsed over stick and stone in solitude. This was Esau's thing, no? He's the man of the field, the rugged outdoorsman, stalking and surviving solo (Genesis 25:27). This felt like a taunt, as if somebody'd said to Jacob, “You want to play dress-up in Esau's clothes and say you're him? Fine, now go live his life.”

Jacob trudged northward, his sights set on Harran, Mom's hometown. There Dad had commissioned him to go, go and finally – finally! – get married, to one of his girl cousins in Uncle Laban's house. But Jacob grumbled under his breath. When Grandpa Abraham sent his steward to find Rebekah for Isaac, the steward went with a platoon of fellow-servants and ten camels loaded with supplies and treasure. Jacob got shoved out the door with nary a donkey to ride, “only that he carried a staff in his hand.”⁴ Other than the clothes on his back and some meager rations, Jacob's hiking “alone and empty-handed.”⁵ At least when the sons of Grandpa's concubines were shooed off, they got parting gifts, consolation prizes (Genesis 25:2-6). Dad had sent him penniless, praying God would bless Jacob's future seed, but how was he supposed to get a wife and raise up kids when he's got nothing to offer Uncle Laban as a bride-price? And that's assuming he even survives the trip there, what with bandits, marauders, vicious beasts, spirits of sickness along the way. Why should Jacob even expect to reach Harran in one piece, with no defense against attack and nobody with him to watch his back?

Jacob's heart returned to the day he left. As a parting word, Dad prayed Jacob receive from El Shaddai “the blessing of Abraham” (Genesis 28:4). But as the sounds of sheep and goats had faded to wind and crickets, Jacob's brain pondered the gulf in the kinship he felt with Grandpa. What linked Jacob, a lost man, with Abraham the adventurer, that holy elder whose absence all the world couldn't fill – Abraham, whose faith raised him to chase down armies, whose love begged the salvation of his despisers, whose devotion defied death and all its powers? “Having fallen prey to guilt and solitary despair,”⁶ Jacob's wondering, why would Isaac's God answer a prayer for Jacob to be blessed with Abraham's blessing? Why, when Jacob had exploited a brother's weakness to secure a birthright? Why, when Jacob had lied to his blind father's face, had swindled Esau out of a priceless moment? Why, when Jacob's heart so bubbles over with greed and guile, would Dad wish good things for him – and why would a God whose name Jacob abused be inclined to ever grant such a wish?

Dad prayed for Jacob to hope for ownership of this land – yeah, the same land Jacob was being kicked out of (Genesis 28:4)! Oh, Dad couched it as a mission with a purpose, but Jacob heard an eviction notice. Nor was he fooled by Mom's idle assurances that she'd send for him in a few days once Esau's temper found something new to glom onto (Genesis 27:44-45). No, pretty words couldn't disguise it: Jacob's heart told him he'd been rejected, cast off, banished, disinherited, replaced by his big brother who gets to keep living in the land of promise Jacob bids goodbye. This was an exile. Years of patience and planning for birthright and blessing have been for nothing but destruction. Jacob's “lost everything – his brother, father, and mother; his past, present, and future.”⁷ A distant home in obscurity, or more dreadfully rotting as roadkill, was surely his destiny.

Daylight's fading fast now, quicker than expected. “His past beclouded, his future uncertain, exposed and alone, he feels his own isolation and insufficiency as the eerie darkness settles upon him.”⁸ Jacob spies a town a little over half a mile to his left – Luz, he thinks it is (Genesis 28:19). He might just be able to reach it in time; should he go there and plead for hospitality. Sordid stories of old Sodom ring bells in the back of his mind. Civilization has its own predators. No, Jacob “disdained to seek lodging” in Luz, preferring to “pass the night in the open air.”⁹ Jacob spied a level area on the hilltop up ahead, and it looked promising.¹⁰ “He met the place, and he lodged there, because the sun had gone down” (Genesis 28:11). The Bible won't tell of a sunrise in Jacob's life for quite some time, after he's faced this “long night of an exile of his own making.”¹¹

As Jacob found the plateau “dark, stony, and hard,”¹² he looked around and saw loose stones – maybe, though he didn't know it, the ruins of Abraham's altar (Genesis 12:8). The biggest one he shifted on the ground to rest his head atop, and others he set around it as a protective fence.¹³ Under the dim light of the moon, Jacob reclined on the bare earth, draped his outer cloak over himself as a blanket, and slowly surrendered to his exhaustion. “Full of self-pity, he fell asleep,”¹⁴ sound and deep, “under the stars with a stone for a pillow.”¹⁵

And there “he dreamed” (Genesis 28:12). This is just the second time the Bible's mentioned dreaming, the first having been when the God spoke to King Abimelech in the night to warn him not to steal Jacob's grandma (Genesis 20:3). Jacob, too, always the smooth-talker, is only in his sleep unguarded enough to “dream as God would have him dream,” a dream that can unmask his waking world and show what he's been blind to.¹⁶ We get the opportunity here to experience Jacob's dream along with him, as three details catch his attention, one by one.

First, “behold, a stairway standing into earth, and the head of it reached into the heavens!” (Genesis 28:12). It isn't quite clear whether this is a ladder, a stairway, or a ramp, but that last phrase should tickle our memories of a spot seventeen chapters ago, when the Bible fiercely lampooned the Mesopotamian habit of building temple-towers called ziggurats to bridge heaven and earth – “a tower with its head in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). But Jacob now sees what the Babel-builders only wished they could've achieved. There it is, but this stairway isn't built from the ground up; it's “stretching from heaven down to earth.”¹⁷

A second detail now catches Jacob's eye. “And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!” (Genesis 28:12). The people of Babel told stories of gods in heaven and gods under the earth sending their messengers back and forth, up and down, “the long staircase of heaven.”¹⁸ That's what Jacob sees, messengers of God shuttling up and down, ascending to contemplate the glories of God's face and descending on missions of activity in his world,¹⁹ “occupying themselves with the business of God.”²⁰ The result of the incessant traffic is “an unceasing connection between upper and lower spheres.”²¹ Their movements attest “that God does not leave anyone outside his care and providence, but governs the universe with his holy angels as his ministers.”²² It seemed now that “heavenly powers in their legions encircled Jacob” as they stepped down to his patch of earth.²³ For “even in his sleep, there were angels who were commanded to ascend and descend around him to protect him.”²⁴ Jacob's jaw drops. He'd thought he was alone and undefended. This was anything but.

Then, one last detail to see, Jacob, beyond the stairway and its up-and-down angels: “And behold! the LORD stood above it” (Genesis 28:13), “the Ruler of Angels set fast upon the stairway..., standing over bodies, over souls, over doings, over words, over angels, over earth, over... all things seen and unseen,” as “the Charioteer of all that vast creation.”²⁵ But the same phrase could just as well be read as “the LORD stood beside him,” as in, next to Jacob. Maybe, without needing to move as the angels do, God appears in Jacob's dream in both places, “at once both near and far,” upon the top of the staircase and standing by Jacob's head.²⁶

And he speaks: “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (Genesis 28:13). Of course he introduces himself; this is the first time God has appeared to Jacob.²⁷ Until now, Jacob has been living on his family's faith, on stories passed down of grandpa's god, of dad's god. That's why Jacob spoke to his dad about “the LORD your God” (Genesis 27:20). It's finally Jacob's turn to meet this God himself. And in that, God identifies Jacob as son, not so much of Isaac, but of Abraham. Before sending him off, Isaac had prayed over Jacob's head for the blessings God gave to Father Abraham, that Jacob might – somehow, despite all behavioral signs – be accepted as successor of Abraham's hopes and Abraham's dreams; that God bless Jacob and make him fruitful, would give Jacob and his future seed the very land promised to the seed of Abraham (Genesis 28:3-4). But those were just Isaac's wishes, Isaac's prayers for Jacob. Now, God himself has sought out Jacob in the darkness and made an answer: Yes! Jacob's seed will be “like the dust of the earth,” and the very fact that Jacob lies on this cold, hard ground is a property claim no less than Abraham's many footsteps (Genesis 28:13-14). Where Jacob has been obsessively “struggling to snatch blessing from others, God is freely offering it to him” as to the rightful heir of Father Abraham, the man who spurned Babel.²⁸

Most of what God declares here to Jacob is a repeat of things we've already heard with Abraham. But God then catches Jacob's attention: “And behold!” Yes, Jacob, see this as clearly in your mind's eye as the dazzling ramp, as the awesome angels! “Behold,” Jacob, “I am with you” – this much Isaac had also heard in the night once (Genesis 26:24) – “and I will keep you in everywhere you go” (Genesis 28:15). God's telling him, “Don't think you're making the journey alone! You have me as a companion, you have me as a protector in all your journey.”²⁹ God, so far from forsaking Jacob in his failures and fears, in his doubts and his duplicity, is making a bid for Jacob, is committing to Jacob. God will be his guardian and guide. God will see to it that he makes it.

Like the builders of Babel, Jacob has been afraid to leave his home, “lest we be scattered on the face of all the earth,” broken apart and cast out (Genesis 11:4). God now tells Jacob that not only is he going with Jacob, not only will he guard Jacob's path, but “I will bring you back to this ground,” to this Canaanite soil beneath your back, “for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you” (Genesis 28:15). God commits not to give up on Jacob, not to forsake Jacob, until the job's done, until Jacob is once more in his native land. Jacob gets the promise that what befell the builders of Babel is not what lies in store for him.³⁰ If the angels of God who go down get to go back up again, then why shouldn't Jacob, descending into exile, come back up this holy hill – and why shouldn't the assembly of peoples multiplied from Jacob harbor the same hope of homecoming?³¹

Isaac had prayed that Jacob might “take possession of the land of your sojournings that God gave to Abraham” (Genesis 28:4); God agrees: “The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your seed” (Genesis 28:13). And where Babel ended when “the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth,” a dispersal that weakened their cohesion and strength, Jacob “shall explode to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south” (Genesis 28:14). That promise would be repeated centuries later, that “you will explode to the right and to the left, and your seed will possess the nations” (Isaiah 54:3). Impelled by divine power, Jacob's destiny is to burst forth from this hill to all directions. But not to dominate; not to self-aggrandize. You, Jacob, “in you shall be blessed all the families of the ground – and in your seed” (Genesis 28:14). Jacob, whose latest deed was hurling his own family into chaos to hoard blessings for himself, must become the very opposite: the touchstone of blessing for all the families who settle the soil, including Laban's, including Esau's.³²

God's promises startle Jacob awake. His eyes fling open to the stars glittering above. His nostrils inhale the scent of Canaanite dirt. It was a dream. His conscious mind struggles and stumbles to digest the dream Jacob's had. I don't know if any of you have ever seen visions and heard the voice of the Lord in a dream, like Jacob did. I have. Trust me when I say, waking up and taking it in is a big shock to the system.

Jacob first has to process the imagery that poked the eye of his mind. Having been a silent and passive observer in his dream, at last Jacob speaks, whispering in the darkness: “Surely the LORD is present in this place – and I... I didn't know!” (Genesis 28:16). Then, we read, “Jacob feared” (Genesis 28:17). It seems an odd reaction, until we consider how horrified Jacob might be to have trespassed on holy ground unawares. He hadn't come with expectation, hadn't purposed a sacred pilgrimage; he was just a tired man, curling up in a suitable spot.³³ He hadn't approached in ritual cleanliness, hadn't hurled off his sandals to stand before a burning bush (cf. Exodus 3:5).³⁴ No, Jacob didn't recognize holy ground, and certainly not that this was where the Almighty gets his mail delivered! Jacob's sense of solitude is shattered, and he isn't sure he's more comfortable now than before. So Jacob feared – Jacob revered – and, his mind reeling, he muttered in the dark of night, “How frightful is this place” – or, “How awesome is this place!” What, Jacob, runs the tingles down your spine? “This is none other than the house of God! And this is the gate of the heavens!” (Genesis 28:17).

When those builders long ago left their city, it was named Babel, which Genesis explains as 'mixed up' (Genesis 11:9) although to the Babylonians, Bab-ili meant 'Gate of God.'³⁵ They'd “call its name Babylon, 'The Homes of the Great Gods.'”³⁶ Jacob now retorts, “No, no, absolutely not – this, here, is where heaven's gate stands open; this is the house of God,” the place Babel only pretends to be.³⁷ So he names this place not 'Babel' but 'Bethel,' 'House of God' (Genesis 28:19), “this place where heaven and earth meet” by that stairway.³⁸ So far from being “very remote from God” like he'd felt, Jacob had been sleeping under God's own care – not so much roughing it as couchsurfing at God's pad!³⁹ As the author of “Amazing Grace” liked to sing it, “Kings are often waking kept, / rack'd with care on beds of state; / never king like Jacob slept, / for he lay at heaven's gate!”⁴⁰

Whether he dozed back off in reassurance or contemplated with racing mind the vision he'd seen, eventually the rays of dawn began to dim the stars and restore shape and color to the ground.⁴¹ Unsurprisingly, later Jewish readers surmised that this was New Year's Day.⁴² When better to meet God and begin life again? Seizing the stone from his head, Jacob hauled it upright, making of it a pillar or, literally, a standing stone, setting it where God had stood by him in the dream.⁴³ He set it there, this stone that touched his head as he dreamt the dream, to “immortalize the dream,”⁴⁴ “to keep the memory fresh for future ages.”⁴⁵ This standing stone models the stairway that stood on earth, and he pours oil on its head because the stairway's head was in the holy heavens.⁴⁶ And Jacob chooses solid, natural stone, unlike the Babel-builders who used “brick in lieu of stone” (Genesis 11:3).⁴⁷ Maybe that's the key here. Where's Jacob being sent? To Harran, to Mom's brother Laban. And Laban's name sounds awfully like the Hebrew word for 'brick' in the Babel chapter. As Jacob readies himself to live with his Uncle Brick in the long shadow of Babel, he needs to remember that “there is no Rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2:2), that “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Psalm 118:22).

Having memorialized and named this place of divine encounter, Jacob has to grapple with the message and not just its medium. We read here that “Jacob vowed a vow” – the first vow in the Bible, and a strangely long one, too. A vow wasn't the same thing as an oath, a promise, or a covenant. It was a special commitment, made only to God and only in situations of dire need, where somebody would voluntarily assume an obligation to repay the vow at the holy place, if and only if the vow's terms were accepted and fulfilled by God.⁴⁸

Jacob lists out the terms and conditions for his vow – terms and conditions totally adapted from what God has just promised him in his dream, but gently emphasizing the parts that mean most to him in the moment. Jacob craves that sense of God being with him, guarding him with angels, keeping him safe down this road that he must travel, his highway in the night (Kyrie eleison...). Jacob has a keen sense of his newfound poverty, and he begs from God the basics of life, “bread to eat and clothing to wear” (Genesis 28:20), this time not food to swap for birthrights or borrowed garments for identity fraud.⁴⁹ And where God had pledged to bring Jacob back to Bethel's ground, Jacob's desire is to “come again to my father's house in peace” (Genesis 28:21) – the peace of safe return and, Jacob might hope, the peace of a repaired relationship and a restored family.⁵⁰

So what does Jacob's vow commit him to? “Then the LORD shall be to me for a God,” he says (Genesis 28:21). We mentioned already how the LORD was Abraham's God, is Isaac's God, but the question now has become, will this God also become “the God of Jacob” (Psalm 146:5)? Jacob, newly under construction, is opening his heart to the possibility of that same kind of personal relationship. What's more, “this stone, which I have set up for a standing stone, shall be the house of God” (Genesis 28:22). A standing stone could be called a 'house of gods' when it was erected to monitor the fulfillment of a vow or treaty.⁵¹ But in the broader sweep of the Bible, Jacob means more than that. He's vowing to make this Bethel his sanctuary, almost a proto-temple, “for in that place there was going to be a house of God.”⁵² And “of all that you give me,” he now prays directly to God – of whatever you see fit to provide, whatever you increase me to by the time I come home as you promised – from that abundance, “with tithe I will give a tenth to you” (Genesis 28:22), as Abraham did to Melchizedek (Genesis 14:20). This is “a binding commitment of thanksgiving” from Jacob, to seal the deal once exile is over.⁵³

There. Jacob's vow is made. “This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice” and get a move on (Psalm 118:24). Those who founded Babel had, we read, “journeyed from the east” (Genesis 11:2), so now “Jacob lifted up his legs and came to the land of the children of the east” (Genesis 29:1), confident that he'd found elsewhere the place that made good all Babel's empty promises.⁵⁴ The Jacob who lifts his legs toward the east is a somewhat different Jacob than the one who drearily and ignorantly napped on holy ground. As he goes forth, “his spiritual sensitivity has been transformed.”⁵⁵ He's now “instructed in what was lacking in his faith.”⁵⁶ The old Jacob was a bit of a Babylonian at heart, a man who's striven to build himself access to heavenly blessings with craft and cunning, who's sought to make a birthright for himself lest he be passed over and forgotten; but this Jacob might just be waking up to the notion that real hope isn't man-made, can't be bought or extorted, can't be orchestrated and gamed by his imposing wit – man shall not live by his wits alone.⁵⁷ So this exilic journey may be “a time of distress for Jacob, yet,” he knows, “he shall be saved out of it” by grace (Jeremiah 30:7).

When the sons and daughters of Jacob surged forth and ascended from Egyptian captivity, and Joshua had led them into the land and put down many petty kings, including the king of Luz (Joshua 12:16), the people could at last see for themselves, centuries later, the stone which Jacob had raised; they could lie down on that hill, close their eyes, and try to picture his dream from the very dirt where he'd dreamed it. As Hosea put it centuries still later, Jacob “met God at Bethel, and there God spoke with us” (Hosea 12:4). In the person of Jacob, the whole people had dreamed this dream, the whole people had met God, the whole people had heard God's promises.

In the days of the judges, Bethel was one of the places Samuel governed from (1 Samuel 7:16); and we read how “the people of Israel arose and went up to Bethel and inquired of God” (Judges 20:18), how “the people came to Bethel and sat there till evening before God” (Judges 21:2). In crisis, you could actually go to this House of God recognized by Jacob and be in God's presence, sit before him, hear from him in your need. When Samuel at last took a flask of oil and poured it on the stony head of Saul, he announced a sign in the form of “three young men ascending to God at Bethel” who would meet Saul like angels on the way (1 Samuel 10:3).

But once Saul's anointed king, it's a long time before we hear much of that place again; our focus is drawn to the Tent of Meeting that's been pitched “at Shiloh which is north of Bethel” (Judges 21:19), which functions as “the House of the LORD” (1 Samuel 1:24), where God “made [his] name dwell at first” (Jeremiah 7:12). But on account of Jacob's people being deceitful, God then “forsook his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among mankind” (Psalm 78:60). Then he “chose David his servant and took him from the sheepfolds,” and “brought him to shepherd Jacob his people” (Psalm 78:70-71). David came to reign south of Bethel, in a city called Jerusalem. And there, as Jacob did, David had a fearsome vision: an angel, not moving up and down, but standing by with destruction in his hands (2 Samuel 24:16-17).

Standing on the hill at ground zero, according to the Chronicles, David “was afraid of the sword of the angel of the LORD,” but when terms of peace were reached, “then David said, 'This is the House of the LORD God, and this is the altar of burnt offering for Israel'” (1 Chronicles 21:30–22:1). The Chronicler puts in David's mouth words that deliberately echo Jacob's waking cry.⁵⁸ This place – near not Luz, but Jerusalem – is the House of God, for which David promptly ordered that stones be cut (1 Chronicles 22:2). And the sacrificial altar there would be the stairway, the heavenly gate. To it would priests ascend and descend by the ramp, to send up from earth to heaven the offerings by flame, much as flame had already descended to the earthen altar.⁵⁹ This Temple Mount is, in effect, David's new Bethel, sanctified to take over from Jacob's.

But when the kingdom was ripped asunder through the folly of David's grandson, the rebellious Jeroboam who set up his throne in the north feared letting his people acknowledge the gate of heaven was where David's scions ruled. So Jeroboam did an awful thing. He turned people back to the old Bethel by corrupting it. He “made two calves of gold..., and he set one in Bethel..., and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places that he had made” (2 Kings 12:28-32). Though Bethel still harbored some disciples who knew the truth (2 Kings 2:3), it became a travesty and a shame. “Come to Bethel and transgress,” mocked the prophet Amos, “bring your tithes every three days” (Amos 4:4). Bethel's high priest Amaziah banned Amos from preaching there, on the grounds that it was, not a house of God, but “a house of the kingdom” (Amos 7:13). Bethel was no longer Bethel. Hence, God warned through Amos, “do not seek Bethel... Bethel shall come to nothing” (Amos 5:5), for “on the day I punish Israel for his transgressions, I will punish the altars of Bethel” (Amos 3:14). Sure enough, once God's judgment brought an end to the breakaway northern kingdom, David's heir Josiah “pulled down and burned... the altar at Bethel..., reducing it to dust” (2 Kings 23:15). No longer was that place the house of God; no longer was it the gate of heaven; no longer was the spot the stuff of dreams. “By this,” prophesied the great Isaiah, “the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for” (Isaiah 27:9).

Though the hill lost its sanctity, the faithful kept looking back at what Jacob once dreamt there. As a new age dawned, some first-century Jews reflected that God's Wisdom had there “guided [Jacob] in right ways, showed him the kingdom of God, and gave him knowledge of holy things” (Wisdom 10:10). “The kingdom of God” – that, they concluded, was what was revealed to Jacob in his dream. Others began to imagine the stairway, or ladder (as they pictured it), as a symbol of the course of future history of the kingdoms of man, its rungs representing to a frightened Jacob years yet to come and the challenges to be surmounted by Israel on the way.⁶⁰

In the lands of the former northern kingdom, there lived a man whose name was Nathanael, whose friend urged him to come meet the One to whom Moses and all prophets had testified (John 1:45-46). Upon coming in view, that Promised One declared of Nathanael, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit,” no guile (John 1:47) – in other words, a man from Jacob's seed who has already become what we hope to watch Jacob learn to be.⁶¹ Surprised and astonished by Jesus' knowledge of him, Nathanael cried out in words appropriate for today's Feast of Christ the King, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49), “anointing the stone by his confession.”⁶²

But hear how Jesus answered Nathanael: “Because I said, 'I saw you under the fig tree,' do you believe? You will see greater things than these! … You will see heaven opened!” (John 1:50-51). This is the kind of language used by explaining angels in Jewish books of apocalypse, where heavenly mediators of revelation introduce the character to escalating visions of awesome mysteries, inviting him over and over to see and believe what God has to show.⁶³ That's what Jesus promises Nathanael, an apocalyptic mystery infinitely precious and secret.

Turning to not Nathanael only but to all the disciples who share his seed of faith, Jesus announces, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on – the Son of Man!” (John 1:51). Jesus has primed Nathanael to remember Jacob, and now promises to show him (and us) Jacob's dream – only in place of the ladder, in place of the stairway, is none other than the Son of Man, Jesus in the flesh!⁶⁴ What is Jesus saying? He's “the link between heaven and earth,”⁶⁵ “the living medium of commerce between heaven and earth,”⁶⁶ “the place where heaven and earth, God and humankind, meet.”⁶⁷

If Jews thought of Jacob's dream as a revelation of the kingdom of God, that kingdom is wherever Jesus walks. If Jews thought of Jacob's ladder as the course of ages to come, Jesus is the shape of past, present, and future. If later rabbis went so far as to imagine that angels went up and came down because Jacob's image was engraved on the throne of God and they wanted to compare image to substance,⁶⁸ Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” himself (Colossians 1:15), the One whom angels most long to see and serve.⁶⁹ More than King of Israel, more even than King of Nations, he is “Lord of the Angels as well,” whose royal ministers they all are.⁷⁰ When Jacob dreamed his dream, when the Lord God stood over and beside him, he “foresaw Christ on earth.”⁷¹

Jesus is “the Temple of God and also the Gate,”⁷² he is “the Christian's Bethel.”⁷³ And nowhere do we see this more astoundingly than at the cross, “the tree which was set up from earth to heaven,”⁷⁴ “and for the nations it was like a staircase unto God.”⁷⁵ “The ladder which Jacob saw,” said ancient readers of the dream, “depicts the cross of our salvation,”⁷⁶ and who should be “the Lord leaning on the ladder” if not Christ crucified for all?⁷⁷ If angels descended to see a dreaming Jacob, “they beheld him, how he embraced his staff and fell asleep on the mountain peak,” and gazed in him at “the image of the crucifixion.”⁷⁸ In fact, Jacob's dream revealed “the future fellowship of men and angels through the cross of Christ,”⁷⁹ for “when it was lifted up, it joined terrestrial creatures with the celestial ones.”⁸⁰ This, the cosmic fellowship through Christ crucified, is the Christian Bethel where, in the open heavens, our spirits behold the glory of the Risen King, the exalted Son of Man.⁸¹ On him do we see our angel-brethren in Christ ascending to worship and descending as “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” through him (Hebrews 1:14).

The stone which Jacob anointed after his dream, memorializing his dream, was first and foremost an image of Jesus as the Anointed One of God.⁸² It was “a sign pointing to Christ,”⁸³ “depicting the mystery of Christ,”⁸⁴ the “Rock anointed for our sakes,”⁸⁵ “anointed with the Holy Spirit by the Father and risen from the dead.”⁸⁶ But “in this rock, the mystery of the Church is also represented.”⁸⁷ Jacob “set up a column and anointed it to God, and that column is the Church..., the mainstay of the truth,”⁸⁸ “the entryway for taking possession of the kingdom of heaven.”⁸⁹ Within it, suggested St. Augustine, the angels are the pastors and “evangelists who preached Christ,” who ascend to declare the heights of Christ's divinity and who descend to press close the dearness of Christ's humanity, and in so doing “climb up and climb down the Son of Man.”⁹⁰ In setting up this cornerstone of the House of God, Jacob “began construction of the Church..., and he sealed the mystery by the oil, so that it would shine brightly” in the world.⁹¹ We are the sign, to our own and to all who need to hear, that they are not alone – that God is with us, that open heavens are near, that the God of Jacob made will not forsake the world until he has fulfilled what he has spoken: “Behold, I make all things new!” (Revelation 21:5). Amen.