Jacob’s Ladder

In Genesis 28 we have the famous passage known from children’s Bible stories as “Jacob’s ladder”, though it should be called “the LORD’S ladder” because it is all about Him, not Jacob. And really our understanding of this passage, at least as I imagined it as a child, has been skewed by our western Home Improvement/Home Depot/HGTV understanding. It is not that Jacob saw a ladder as we know it, but he probabaly saw a ziggurat as pictured below. In the ancient Near East, people erected these buildings and believed that gods dwelt on the top. Probably the tower of Babel, as recorded in Genesis 11, was one of these as well. So when Jacob saw the angels ascending and descending, it was probably up and down the steps of one of these ziggurats, and not an actual ladder as is captured in the painting above by the famous artsist Marc Chagall. Jacob realized that he was in the presence of Yahweh, the God of his father and grandfather. What a sight it must have been. And what we see foreshadowed in this event is a picture of Jesus, the Son of God, who became flesh and dwelt among us {John 1:14}.