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Abraham gets the covenant and Moses gets the law, but Jacob gets the contact. He sees messengers going up and down between earth and heaven, he wrestles one of them through a night, and he walks away with a new name that becomes the name of a nation. When I read Genesis with the Hebrew words left in place, Jacob is the patriarch whose story is most physical about the beings around YHWH. This page collects where he appears on the site.
The sullam at Bethel
On the way to Haran, Jacob sleeps with a stone for a pillow. On Genesis 28 I keep the Hebrew terms in the verse:
And he dreamed, and behold a sullām set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the malʾāḵîm of Elohim ascending and descending on it.
Genesis 28:12
A sullām is a ramp or stairway, and the malʾāḵîm are messengers, not winged figures from later art. When he wakes, Jacob calls the place “the house of Elohim” and “the gate of heaven”, sets up the stone as a pillar and pours oil on it. A fixed point where traffic between earth and sky happens is how I read the place he renamed Bethel.
Wrestling the messenger
The second encounter is the one that changes his name. On Isra’el – The Powerful Yisra I go through Genesis 32:
"Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with the messenger of YHWH and with humans and have overcome."
Genesis 32:28
The name joins yisra, to strive or to rule, with El. On that page I also look at the hierarchy: even the powerful Yisra remained subordinate to YHWH.
YHWH’s portion
Jacob is also the answer to a question about who rules which people. On Deuteronomy:
When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’S portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.
Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (KJV)
Mauro Biglino reads this literally. On The Bible: Blend and unify the Gods into One:
Yahweh, far from being the one and only transcendent 'God', was simply one of the Elohim: the one who, as mentioned above, was assigned the task of ruling over a well defined territory and over a portion of a family, that of Jacob (Deuteronomy 32:8).
Mauro Biglino
The same pairing returns when YHWH introduces himself to Moses on The Israelites as “the Elohim of Abraham, the Elohim of Isaac, and the Elohim of Jacob” (Exodus 3:15).
Kronos called Israel
Outside the Bible, Jacob’s other name turns up in a surprising place. On Kronos/Saturn and Jacob/Israel in Phoenician Tradition I follow Philo of Byblos, who passed on Sanchuniathon’s Phoenician history and says Kronos was called El or Israel. A father of an era and a father of twelve tribes were blended into one figure. The same equation is on Kronos, a Phoenician deity also called El, and on Saturn I follow Kronos as the ruler of the age before Zeus.
The star out of Jacob
Jacob’s name also carries a prophecy. On Archaeology for the star from Jacob, Expedition Bible stands on the ridges where Balaam looked down on the camp and reads Numbers 24:17:
a star will come out of Jacob a scepter will rise out of Israel
Expedition Bible, Archaeology for the star from Jacob, at 13:57
The channel ties that star to Bethlehem and the Magi. For me the line shows how Jacob became shorthand for the whole people that came from him.
Related pages
- Genesis 28 – Sullām, the Heavenly Ladder
- Isra’el – The Powerful Yisra
- Kronos/Saturn and Jacob/Israel in Phoenician Tradition
- Deuteronomy
- The Bible: Blend and unify the Gods into One
- The Israelites
- Kronos, a Phoenician deity also called El
- Archaeology for the star from Jacob
For every page I tagged with jacob, see the jacob tag archive.
