Jacob’s Dream and the Transformational Moment

The narrative of Jacob’s dream in Gen. 28:10-22 describes nothing less than a transformational moment in the life of Israel’s eponymous ancestor, the one who lends his name to his descendants.

Despite the prenatal oracle which Rebecca has received concerning his expected triumph over his brother, the Jacob we have seen in Gen. 25-27 has had no contact with God, and has given little indication of a nascent ability to be the father of his people. Before the dream, he is a refugee from family strife, the deceiver of his father and brother, who is sent away to forestall his brother’s murderous intentions and to find a wife from “the old country”. But after the dream he is a different person, the recipient of the same divine promise which was received by his father and grandfather, with an identical promise of progeny and an equivalent claim to the land of Canaan. Moreover, he has begun his lifelong relationship with the God of his fathers. As his departure from the land is marked by the miraculous ladder dream, so his return to Canaan in Gen. 32 will be marked by another momentous encounter with the divine, in which he receives his new name Israel, and his status as the father of the twelve tribes is firmly established.

The story itself is related simply but indelibly. We encounter Jacob as a young man in flight, on the road towards an unknown future in far away Aram, uncertain about what tomorrow holds in store for him. He stops to sleep at what seems to be an unknown location, takes a stone for a pillow, and is the recipient of a most amazing dream. In quick succession he sees three interrelated images in Gen. 28:12-13. First, a ladder, or some type of ramp (some see a connection with the Mesopotamian ziggurat), stretching heavenward. Suddenly the camera focuses in more closely, and he perceives motion on the ramp. The figures which he identifies as divine messengers are in constant motion, indicating that the ladder is indeed a passageway that can be traversed, back and forth, up and down. Once again the image shifts, this time upward; the ladder falls away, and he beholds God above him. A voice emerges, God identifies himself and promises Jacob the very things which will guarantee his future: land, security, a guarantee of protection, and most important, a promise to return him to the land. Just as suddenly the dream ends; Jacob awakes in 28:16-17 in a state of amazement over the content of this dream, astonished at the realization that he had been sleeping at a sacred location. He erects a sacred pillar to mark the site of this visitation, names the place Bethel, “House of God”, and vows to build a temple to God at that very spot upon his return to the land.

The story told here is at once evanescent and eternal. On the one hand it is a traveler’s passing dream, a brief stop on the way to more important things in life – marriage, occupation, children. And yet the hope expressed here serves as a blueprint for the rest of Jacob’s life: He is not traveling away from his home, but is being guided on the path away from and back to the land; his fellow travelers are nothing less than angelic figures, and the Deity itself addresses him directly and promises him a safe return. In the biblical worldview dreams such as these are not incidental, and are most often the bearers of great significance for the dreamer. The dream can be said to recapitulate Jacob’s life in symbolic form, journeying from the land and returning to it, protected from danger by the fact that he is constantly in contact with God.

But in addition to reflecting a significant moment in Jacob’s life, the story can also be read outside of its particular context, as a paradigmatic description of the encounter between the human and the divine in the Bible. Moses at the burning bush, the call of Samuel at Shiloh, the initiatory visions of prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel – all describe the dynamic of the divine-human encounter in a similar fashion. Each story is different, each address by God is unique, and the human response to prophecy is highly individual. Yet these stories are built upon the same basic structure. Let us look again at this story of Jacob’s dream as it reflects the dynamic of theophany in the Bible and its significance for the hero of the story.

First, the contact with the divine requires solitude, a distancing from friends and family, from the travails of his social existence. Usually the separation is of a temporary nature, though in Jacob’s case it entails the beginning of an enforced isolation from his immediate family. The reason for the separation is clear: Contact with the divine is generally not a group experience (the revelation at Sinai being the great exception), and involves a meeting of which is fraught with danger and significance. Such a moment must take place away from the familiar and the ordinary. This reflects an essential paradox about the contact between the human world and the numinous. While these spheres take constant notice of one another, they rarely come into direct contact in the Bible. The separation from society emphasizes this strangeness of the encounter, and assures that the meeting will not be understood as a commonplace occurrence.

Next, the initial encounter with the divine commonly has both visual and verbal components, both of which are essential to the experience. The visual aspect varies greatly, from Moses’ burning bush (Exod. 3) to Ezekiel’s chariot vision (Ezek. 1), but its purpose is generally the same: to attract attention, to indicate a radical shift from the everyday, to grab the attention of the person being addressed and to direct him towards the meeting with God. The visual aspect is more than just a display of fireworks, but conveys meaning as well, as Jacob’s ladder dream symbolizes the basic sense of communication with the divine. The verbal aspect contains the actual articulated message to be transmitted – the promise, the direct address, the revelation of the nature of the Deity with whom he meets, and the details of the promise made or the task with which he is charged. Taken together, these two interrelated phenomena forecast the nature of the relationship with the divine which is to acted out subsequently in the life of the individual.

The human reaction to this divine address is best characterized by the term “awe”, and entails a mixture of fear and fascination; fear at being in the presence of the numinous, and fascination at the ability to catch a glimpse of the nature of the divine. Thus Jacob is both beguiled and frightened in 28:16 – “How awesome/dreadful is this place” – and is possessed by a sense of creature consciousness, an awareness of human inadequacy in the face of the holy, and a feeling of shame for having mistaken a holy site for a place to rest his head. This is followed immediately by an sense of radical amazement in 28:17: “This can only be a house of God, a gateway to heaven” – a place which at the same time allows him to have contact with the divine, as a gateway to enter into a new type of relationship with this God. The transformative aspect is also reflected in Jacob’s awareness that something has changed irrevocably – before he was unaware, but now he understands something different about the place, about God, about himself.

The final phase of this contact with the divine is denoted by a response to the experience which is intended to transcend the immediate emotional reactions described in the previous paragraph, in order to place the encounter in a larger perspective. Contact with the divine results not only in internal realization, but gives birth to a range of externalized responses as well which are directed outward, toward society and towards the future. So Jacob sanctifies the site both by action and by words, and promises to return to build a temple to God at the site and to establish a regimen of regular worship there. The experience is not simply a private religious experience, but has ramifications for the rest of Jacob’s life, and for his family and people as well.

This last stage in particular clarifies how the encounter with the divine serves to shape human identity and destiny in the Bible, as it brings together the private experience of the individual with the ultimate concerns of the life of the people. The meeting itself is unexpected and disturbing, upsetting a normative perception of the self and the world to point to a different understanding of reality, a changed perception of the meaning of one’s life. Jacob will not be renamed Israel until a later chapter, but the dream and his response to it demonstrate clearly how the encounter transforms Jacob, and sets him on a path which resonates with personal and national significance.

Kekst Fellow for 2003-2005 Dr. George Savran is a lecturer in Bible Studies at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and coordinator of the Schechter MA Track in Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies. He is currently completing Encountering the Divine: Theophany in Biblical Narrative, to be published by Sheffield Academic Press.

Photo: Jacob’s Dream by William Blake (c. 1805, British Museum, London).