Jacob and the Ladder at Bethel

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It is night, in the hills, and a man is lying on the ground with his head on a rock.

Not a pillow. Not a rolled-up coat. A rock. He has looked around for something softer, and there was nothing, and he is very tired, and so he has found the least terrible stone he could and put his head on it, and he has gone to sleep. He has no tent, no servants, no camels. He has a staff, a little bread, and a great many things on his mind.

And while he sleeps, the ground beside him begins, very quietly, to be a place where heaven touches earth. There is a stairway. It starts at his feet and it goes up out of sight. And on it, going up and coming down, with no hurry at all, are the angels of God.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the book of Genesis, chapter twenty-eight, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. A few small thoughts in the traveller's head, and the weather, and the hills, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, who is this man, and why is he sleeping outdoors with a stone for a pillow?

His name is Jacob. If you have been with us for the evening of the camels at the well, you will remember that Rebekah, the girl who watered the camels, married Isaac, and that after a long wait they had twin sons. Esau came first. He was red and hairy and loved the open country, and he was good with a bow, and he was his father's favourite. Jacob came second, holding on to his brother's heel, which is what his name is thought to mean: the heel-holder, or, if you are being less kind about it, the one who trips you up. He was quieter, and stayed among the tents, and he was his mother's favourite.

Now, I should say plainly that this is a family where a great many things go wrong. The book does not hide it, and neither shall we. In chapter twenty-five, Esau comes in hungry from the fields and sells his birthright, which was the place of the firstborn, to Jacob for a bowl of stew. In chapter twenty-seven, when old Isaac is blind and thinks he is near the end of his life, and sends Esau out to hunt so that he can bless him, Rebekah and Jacob arrange for Jacob to take the blessing instead. Jacob puts on his brother's clothes and goat skins on his arms, and goes in to his father, and says he is Esau. And Isaac, who is blind, gives him the blessing.

I do not want to make this episode into a lecture, and I do not want to pretend it is a charming little prank. The book does not call it a prank. It says that when Esau came in from the hunt, and found out, he cried out "with an exceeding great and bitter cry." And it says that Esau hated Jacob, and said to himself that when the days of mourning for his father came, he would kill his brother.

So that is why Jacob is on the road. Not a pilgrimage. Not an adventure. A young man who has done a wrong thing, and got what he wanted by it, and has now got to leave home in a hurry, because his brother wants to kill him.

Rebekah hears of Esau's plan, and she says to Jacob: go, flee to my brother Laban in Haran, and stay with him a while, until your brother's fury turns away. It is a long way. Haran is far to the north and east, up in the country where Abraham once set out from, and the road there is something like five or six hundred miles, which is about the distance from, say, London to the north of Scotland, on foot, with no map, in the days before roads. Rebekah says "a while." The book will tell us, in a few chapters, that the while is about twenty years. Rebekah, I think, did not know that. She never sees her son again. The book does not tell us she does, and it is one of the quiet sorrows in it.

And Isaac, the father who has just been deceived, does a very remarkable thing. He calls Jacob in, and blesses him again, knowingly this time, and sends him off with a prayer. "May God Almighty bless you," he says, "and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples. May he give you the blessing of Abraham." I find that a very moving line. Isaac knows exactly what Jacob has done. And he blesses him anyway, and sends him off with the family promise, as if to say: this is bigger than your mistake, and it is bigger than mine.

And so Jacob leaves Beersheba, in the south of the land, and goes toward Haran.

Let us set the scene a little more, because the setting matters here.

Beersheba is at the edge of the dry south, where the land turns to desert. Jacob goes north, and the country changes as he walks. The ground begins to rise, and it grows stony. If you have ever walked in the hills of the central part of that land, you will know the stones. They are everywhere. They are pale grey, and the fields are full of them, and every farmer in those hills for four thousand years has spent a good part of every spring picking stones out of the soil and piling them in walls. A man looking for a stone in that country does not have far to look.

It is not the sort of country where you can walk for a few hours and arrive at an inn. In the days of Jacob, a traveller either found a village, or knew someone, or slept outdoors. Jacob does not know anyone. He is a young man who has always lived in his father's tents, among servants, with a mother who sees that he is fed, and he has never in his life had to find a place to sleep.

The days of that walk, the book does not tell us. We know only that he went out from Beersheba, and that "he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set."

I like that sentence very much. "Because the sun had set." There is no great reason for stopping here. It is not a famous place. It is not a holy place, so far as he knows. It is just where he was when it got dark.

I think there is something freeing in that, for anyone who has ever felt that God must be somewhere else, somewhere more suitable, with better lighting. Jacob did not choose the place. He did not travel to a shrine, or climb a famous mountain, or wait for a sign. He ran out of daylight on an ordinary hill, and that was the appointment. If you are reading the story of your own day and thinking that nothing much is happening in it, that it is only a stretch of road between one thing and another, then you are, I think, in very good company.

There is also the matter of the night itself. In that country, away from any town, the dark is complete. There are no lamps in the distance, no glow on the clouds. There are stars, a great many of them, more than most of us have ever seen, and a cold that comes up out of the stones once the sun has gone. A man alone there would pull his cloak around him, and listen to the small sounds of the hillside, and try not to think about jackals. Then he would sleep, because the body, in the end, insists on it.

So here is a young man at the end of a day, on a hill, in the dusk.

He has been walking for, let us say, two or three days. His feet are sore. His shoulders hurt. He has had the last of the bread his mother packed for him. Perhaps, somewhere in his head, he is going over the last few weeks, the way you do when you are on your own and tired. The tent. The goat skins. His father's voice saying, "Who are you, my son?" And his own voice answering. And then, a few hours later, his brother's cry.

I do not know what he was thinking. The book does not say, and I would not like to put words in his mouth about it. But I think we can say that he was a man who was alone, for the first time in his life, and who had good reason to feel it.

And I think he would have been afraid. Not of the dark so much, though there is plenty of dark out there. He would have been afraid of what he had done, and of what was behind him, and of what was ahead. He is leaving the land that has been promised to his family, and going out of it, into a country he has never seen, to live among people he has never met, in the house of an uncle he knows only by name.

And there is, if I may say so, one more thing he has probably thought about. When Isaac blessed him the second time and sent him away, he said, "May God give you the blessing of Abraham." But Abraham heard God speak. Abraham saw three visitors at the oak at Mamre. Jacob has heard nothing. As far as the book has told us, God has not yet spoken to Jacob at all. Jacob has his father's blessing, and his father's God, and no word from God himself.

That is Jacob on the hill. A man who has inherited a great deal, who has never yet been spoken to.

So he looks around, and he takes one of the stones of the place, and he puts it under his head. And he lies down.

And he dreamed.

Now I want to read you the next verse slowly, because it is one of the most famous in the whole book, and it is worth hearing as it is written. "And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it."

A quick word about that word, "ladder." It is the word that the old English translations used, and it has stuck in our heads and in our songs. The Hebrew word is one that is used only here. It is related to a word for a ramp, or a raised road, or a staircase, and many modern translations say "stairway." So you may picture whichever you like. I like to picture something rather wide, a kind of great stair going up out of the stony hillside. But the book does not give us measurements, or materials. It tells us three things about it. It is set up on the earth. Its top reaches to heaven. And the angels are on it.

And about the angels, one more word. They are not described. The book says nothing about wings. It says nothing about white robes, or harps, or halos, which are things that later painters gave them. It says only "the angels of God." And it says what they are doing, which is going up and going down. Not flying. Not fighting. Not guarding. Just going up and coming down, as people do on a staircase, in the middle of the night, with no sound recorded.

I think that is rather a lovely picture of what angels are for. They are God's messengers, and they are on the way between heaven and earth, and they are going both directions. Up, carrying what? Down, carrying what? The book does not say. But there are two directions, and the road is busy.

And now, the next sentence, which I think is the heart of it.

"And behold, the Lord stood above it."

Or, as some translations have it, beside him. The Hebrew can be read either way, and the old traditions have read it both ways. Either God is at the top of the stairway, looking down. Or he is standing right there by Jacob, at the foot, in the dark, on the stony hill. Either way, he is there. The place that has looked so empty is not empty.

And God speaks to Jacob.

I want you to notice, first, what God says first. After everything the book has just told us, after the stew and the goat skins and the blind old man and the brother's cry, you might expect the first words to be a rebuke. They are not. The first words are a name. "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac." Before anything else, God says who he is, and whose family this is. He introduces himself as the God of the grandfather and of the father, as one who has been in this family for a long time. And now he is speaking to the grandson.

And then the promises come, and there are a good many of them, so let me tell them one at a time, slowly.

First, the land. "The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants." Think of that. He is lying on it. It is the stony ground under his shoulder blades. He is the one man in all the world who is lying exactly on the promise.

Second, the people. "Your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south." The dust. He has been walking in it for three days. It is on his clothes, and in his hair, and between his toes. And God says: so many.

Third, the blessing for everyone else. "And by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed." This is the same promise that was given to Abraham, and it is worth noticing that it is not only for Jacob's family. The blessing goes through them and out to everyone. The Church has always heard in that line the shape of what was to come, and it is one that we will leave at that, tonight.

And fourth, and I think this is the one that Jacob needs most of all, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."

Wherever you go. He is going out of the land, and he is afraid of that. And God says: I am with you there too. I will bring you back. I will not leave you.

I think you can hear, in that, the answer to the loneliness we talked about. Jacob has gone to sleep a man who has not yet been spoken to by God, and in the next sentence he is told that God will not leave him until it is done. And notice: nothing in the speech asks him to be better first. The book will tell us, in the chapters that follow, that Jacob has a good deal to learn, and that he learns it slowly, and sometimes painfully, and that his uncle Laban turns out to be a man who tricks him in the same way he tricked his brother. But the promise is made before the lessons. It comes first. It comes on a bad night, on a hard stone, to a man who has not earned it.

I find that very comforting. I hope you do too.

Then Jacob wakes.

The book says that he "awoke from his sleep." It does not say he woke quickly. It says he woke, and then he said something, and I would like you to hear it as I think it must have sounded, quietly, as a man says something to himself in the dark.

"Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."

I could spend the whole of the rest of the night on that sentence. It is such a plain one. He does not say, "Wonderful, a vision." He does not say, "I have had a very strange dream." He says: God was here. He was here all along. And I walked right up to him, and lay down on the ground beside him, and went to sleep, and I did not know.

And then he is afraid. The book says "he was afraid," and I do not think it is the fear of a thing that might hurt him. I think it is the other kind, the kind you feel when you have walked into a room and realised, too late, who is in it. "How awesome is this place!" he says. "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

The house of God. The gate of heaven. On a bare hill, with a stone, in the middle of the night, a long way from his father's tents. It is hardly a cathedral. There is no altar. There is no priest. There is nothing there but dust and rock, and a frightened young man who has just learned that the place is, after all, an open door.

I think that this is one of the great teachings of the whole book, and it is hidden in plain sight. We tend to think of holy places as places that have been set aside and made grand. And some of them are, and the Church builds them, and it is right to. But the first holy place in the book of Genesis that anyone names a house of God is not built by anyone. It is a place where somebody was lying down in the dark and found that he was not alone.

Now Jacob does what a person does who has had a great experience and wants to keep it.

He gets up early, in the morning, and takes the stone that he had put under his head, and he sets it up as a pillar. And he pours oil on the top of it. The book does not say where the oil came from; we may suppose it was a little of what he carried for the road, which would make it a real gift. And then he gives the place a name. It had been called Luz. He calls it Bethel, which means "house of God."

A small thing, and a lovely one. The stone that was his pillow, the hardest and worst bed he ever had, becomes the marker of the holiest night of his life. He does not get rid of it. He does not forget it. He makes it into something that will tell the next person who passes: here, once, a man was spoken to.

And then Jacob makes a vow. I should say that it is a very Jacob-like vow, in that it is a little careful, and a little like a bargain, and I think the book is quite honest about that. He says: "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house. And of all that you give me I will give the tenth to you."

Let us not make too much of the "if." He is a young man, a frightened one, and he is saying it in the only way he knows how. What he asks for is not great riches. It is bread, and clothes, and a safe return. And what he promises is a good deal: that the Lord shall be his God, and that he will return a tenth of everything he is given.

I think the quiet lesson is that God accepts him as he is. He does not wait for a more polished vow. The promise has already been made, and Jacob's reply is, so to speak, his first stammering answer. It is a beginning.

And then, with his stone behind him, and the oil drying on it in the morning sun, he gets up, and picks up his staff, and goes on toward Haran.

Now, the wind-down, as we make our way to the end.

What became of him? A great deal, and we will not tell it all tonight. In the next chapter he arrives at a well, and meets a girl named Rachel, who is a shepherdess, and he loves her at once. He works for her father, Laban, for seven years, and is given her older sister instead, and works another seven. He has a great many children, and many flocks, and troubles of every kind. And twenty years after that night at Bethel, he comes back, and he meets his brother Esau on the road, and Esau runs to meet him, and embraces him, and weeps. But that is for another evening, and it is a lovely one.

And years later, in chapter thirty-five, God tells Jacob to go up to Bethel, and Jacob goes back to the very place, and builds an altar. So the stone that was a pillow, and then a pillar, becomes at last an altar, and the vow is kept. Jacob does give the tenth, and he does come home.

And his name changes, too. In a later chapter, he wrestles with a stranger in the night, and is given the name Israel. And so the people who come from him are called by that name. But we will leave that for later.

There is one more thing worth noticing about the way the book ends the story of that night. It does not tell us that Jacob felt better, or that he understood everything, or that his troubles were over. They were not. His road to Haran was still long, and his uncle was still waiting, and his brother's anger was still behind him. All that has changed is that Jacob knows something he did not know when he lay down. He knows that the place where he stood was a gate, that the one who spoke to him is with him, and that the promise stands. A person can carry a great deal of difficulty if he is sure of that.

So we leave him on the hill, on the first morning, in the light, with his staff in his hand and a pillar of stone behind him, a little wiser than he was, and a good deal less alone.

I would like to say one thing about how the Church has loved this story.

In the Gospel according to John, chapter one, when the disciple Nathanael first meets Jesus, Jesus says to him: "You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." And the Church has always heard in that a reference to Jacob's dream. In Jacob's dream, there was a stairway, and angels on it, and a God standing by it. In the Gospel, the stairway is a person. And the Church has always held that Jesus is where heaven and earth are joined, and that there, at last, is the true house of God, the gate of heaven.

And in the Orthodox Church, the Mother of God has been honoured for fifteen hundred years with a title that comes from this story. In the hymn called the Akathist, she is greeted as the ladder by which God came down. And she is so called not because she is a ladder, but because through her the Son of God came down to earth, and the old dream became true.

And in the monasteries, both East and West, the ladder became a picture of the life of prayer. In the West, Saint Benedict, in his Rule, which he wrote in the sixth century, uses Jacob's ladder as a picture of the life of humility. We go up, he says, by coming down. And in the East, Saint John Climacus, whose name means "of the ladder," wrote a book called The Ladder of Divine Ascent, with thirty rungs, one for each year of the hidden life of Christ, and it is read in Orthodox monasteries every year in Lent. I think there is a lovely irony in that. All those holy people, writing for hundreds of years about climbing, and the first thing the book of Genesis tells us about the ladder is that Jacob did not climb it. He was asleep. It was the angels who were going up and down. And God was standing there.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's episode that comes from the story of Jacob comes from Genesis, chapters twenty-five to twenty-eight, with a brief look ahead at chapters twenty-nine to thirty-five. That is where the sale of the birthright, the blessing, Esau's anger, Rebekah's plan, Isaac's second blessing, the stone, the stairway, the angels, the words of God, the waking, the pillar, the oil, the new name Bethel, and the vow all come from. The line from the Gospel according to John is from chapter one, verse fifty-one.

What we invented is the weather, the stony hills, the soreness of Jacob's feet, and a few small thoughts in his head on the road. None of it changes what happens or what it means, and all of it is in the spirit of the original.

Three details are worth being careful about. First, the word we usually translate as "ladder" appears only here in the Bible, and scholars are not sure whether it means a ladder, a ramp or a stairway, so please picture whatever you like. Second, the Hebrew of the line "the Lord stood above it" can also mean "stood beside him," and the old readers took it both ways. Third, the distance. Haran was a very long way from Beersheba, and we gave you a rough figure for it, but the book gives none, and it should be taken only as a rough picture of how far he had to go.

The Akathist and the writings of Saint Benedict and Saint John Climacus are real, and they do read the ladder in the ways we described. We have not told you more than we are sure of about them. And later Jewish and Christian traditions say a great deal more about the stone, and about the place, and about the angels. We left those out on purpose, because they are traditions rather than text, and because tonight we wanted to tell only what the page says.

That's the story of Jacob for tonight. If you would like to remember him and the other forefathers in your prayers, the Orthodox Church honours them on the Sundays before Christmas, and the Catholic Church keeps them in the readings of its liturgy through the year. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing, taken from the words of the dream itself. May you find, tonight, that the Lord is in this place, even if you did not know it. May you sleep as well as Jacob did, on a much softer pillow. May the angels go up and down over your house, and carry up what you cannot say, and bring down what you need. And may you wake in the morning, and know that you are not alone, and that you will not be left until all that is promised has been done.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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