Too Hot for Jacob to Fall Asleep (Genesis 28)
CLIMATE BIBLE STUDY: August 2023
Jacob's Dream (1639) by José de Ribera, at the Museo del Prado, Madrid
by Lowell Bliss
Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership, WCIU
“In the midst of an already record-breaking heat wave, Phoenix, Ariz., set a particularly eye-popping record: the temperature only dropped to 97 degrees Fahrenheit [36.11 degrees C] overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, setting an all-time record high for a nighttime low. When temperatures stay high overnight, they place a particularly heavy burden on the body, raising the risk of heat illness and death” (Scientific American, July 19, 2023).
“Almonds are under threat. Rising temperatures, lack of water and encroaching development are creating tough conditions for the crucial California crop. Their continued viability could all depend on strengthening the lands on which they sit” (Modern Farmer, July 14, 2023).
Certain biblical stories are a part of every child’s Sunday School upbringing, but it is amazing what “the hottest month in recorded human history” can reveal about how they have been misrepresented. Take the story of “Jacob’s Ladder” in Genesis 28. Jacob himself later interprets what happened to him that night when he fell asleep with a rock as his pillow and had a dream of angels ascending and descending between earth and heaven. It was God, Jacob said, “who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone” (Gen 35:3).
Two Sundays ago, it was a hot July 2023 walk to our little Anglican parish across the Welland Canal. The Old Testament reading was Genesis 28, but our rector, as is her wont, spoke from the Gospel reading. Nonetheless, I was daydreaming about that old spiritual “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” you know: the one that repeats the phrase three times before ending the stanza in a measured beat: “soldiers of the cross.” Maybe if the voice in my head was the folk singer Pete Seeger, I would have thought differently, but I was remembering Billy Graham’s famed vocalist George Beverly Shea.
My first thought was: why did they think they needed to militarize Jacob’s vision? There are no soldiers in the story. Then my second thought was: why does the song have us humans ascending the ladder? Those were angels. And finally: why all the reference to ascending? (The second stanza is “every round [or rung] goes higher, higher.”) The dream includes an equal amount of descending on the ladder as ascending. Admittedly, there is much in Scripture about ascent and aspiration, and for the enslaved Africans in America who composed the original spiritual, ascent meant escape, redemption, and healing. But, according to Jacob, that’s not what the events of Genesis 28 are trying to teach us.
Jacob was fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau and the disappointment of his father Isaac, when he “stopped for the night because the sun had set” (v.10). The “certain place” he had reached was named Luz, which according to the name apparently refers to an almond grove. In a fact that never failed to amaze us Sunday School kids as much as the glorious ladder did: Jacob took a stone and used it as a pillow! Even his sleep was a misery. In the middle of his fear and discomfort, Jacob has a dream.
The first thing we learn about the ladder (or “stairway”) is that it is “resting on the earth” (v. 12). Sure, its top is “reaching to heaven,” but the words earth and land and place are mentioned in this passage many more times than heaven, along with the word dust and the very earthly cardinal directions: north, south, east, west. The point of the dream is not Jacob’s escape into heaven, but the coming-and-going, the ascending-and-descending, the thinning of space, enough to make Jacob cry out upon awakening: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel [which means “house of God], though the city used to be called Luz (Gen 28:18-19).
The pillow became a pillar. Every sleepless resident of Phoenix who tries to lay her head down at night can whisper out, “Emmanuel. God with us. Surely the Lord is in this desert.” Every worried farmer in California can step into his almond grove and say, “this earth is none other than the house of God.”
Jacob immediately turns his experience into a prayer. He is worried about safety on his journey. He is worried about the very practical matters of food to eat and clothes to wear (v. 20). Years later, after his marriages, after (somewhat) reconciling with his brother, Jacob announces to his clan that he intends to return to Bethel where he will build a proper altar to God, “who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” That’s the lesson I want to teach to Sunday School kids growing up in the climate crisis: God will be with you too, even in the hottest summer in recorded human history.