Jacob's Ladder

And he [Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed....

-- Genesis 28: 12-13 (KJV)

You may know the flower Jacob's Ladder, with its long, delicate pistil and bluish petals. But did you know that the original Jacob's ladder, which reached to heaven, wasn't a ladder at all?

As we pick up the story, Jacob's mother Rebekah has sent him to seek a wife in Paddan-aram, the land of her father. This mission, partly intended to keep Jacob from falling in love with a pagan, also gets him out of the way of Isaac (his father) and Esau (his elder brother), both of whom he's cruelly tricked.

Jacob, you see, is not a very nice fellow. So it would seem strange that God should elect him as the next in the line of Hebrew patriarchs (after Abraham and Isaac). But the ways of Yahweh are mysterious, and so is the method he chooses to tell Jacob the news.

In a verse composed by the Elohist (E), when an exhausted Jacob stops to rest on the first night of his journey, he dozes off on a stone pillow and begins dreaming. In a vision, he beholds "angels of God" mounting and descending a stairway or ramp, in Hebrew sullam and improbably translated as "ladder" in the King James Version. The angels, imagined to be roughly the size and shape of human beings, would have had a hard time climbing up and down a ladder all at once, as they are described doing. More likely, sullam refers to a stone-cut stairway (a common sight in the ancient Near East), or perhaps even to the graduated face of a ziggurat.

Since the E narrative breaks off here, we hear nothing more about the angels or the stairway. Though the King James rendering suggests that Jacob sees God standing "above" the "ladder," in the original verse by the Yahwist (J), Jacob is not dreaming, and Yahweh appears right beside him. This is when the Lord informs Jacob that he and his "seed" (descendants) shall inherit "the land whereon thou liest," including not only the precise spot (which Jacob names Beth-el, "house of God") but the expanse of territory surrounding it. This is the so-called "promised land," which has in fact already been promised to Abraham and will later be promised to Moses. (The phrase "promised land" never appears in the King James Version.)

The upshot of all this is that the image of "Jacob's ladder," confined to one verse, is never properly explained or interpreted. It is most likely, once again, an allusion to Babylonian myth, in which the gods were said to appear atop ziggurat temples. As such, the tale may prefigure the building of a temple at Beth-el, a place sacred to the northern tribes of Israel (Jacob calls it the "gate of heaven" in verse 17; "heaven's gate" is not in the Bible).

In any case, this passage is so obscure that English speakers have been able to apply the phrase "Jacob's ladder" to a wide variety of items, none of them having anything to do with Jacob or even the Bible. The first beneficiary, Polemonium caeruleum, was the plant mentioned above, a garden variety whose leaves arrange themselves in a vaguely ladderlike pattern. By the mid-nineteenth century, "Jacob's ladder" had also become the name of rope ladders with wooden steps used to climb from the deck of a ship up its rigging. Steep flights of steps, for example at Oxford and on St. Helena, also took the phrase as a proper name, as did a now-obsolete sort of industrial elevator. Finally, and most whimsically, the English once called stocking-runs "Jacob's ladders" -- perhaps after the fancy that the original mounted to heaven.

If you're interested in knowing how Jacob fares in wife-hunting, he does find a spouse among Rebekah's kin -- in fact, he finds two, Leah and Rachel. But that's another story. More pertinent is that, on his way home fourteen years later (Genesis 32), Jacob once again has a roadside dream; in this one he wrestles with an adversary, who turns out to be Yahweh himself. By staying in the game until morning, Jacob displays his newfound moral strength, and earns from God the new name "Israel," which the Bible claims is derived from "striven [sarita] with gods [elohim]." But more likely "Israel" is from the Hebrew for "may God preserve."

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!