Weekly Torah Reading, Vayyetze, December 10, 2024
Covering Genesis 28:10 to 32:3
Thoughts on a Ladder
In this week’s reading, Jacob leaves his family’s home in Beer-sheba bound for Haran. Stopping for the night at a certain place, he falls asleep and has a strange dream. “A ladder was set into the ground with its top reaching to the heavens, and the angels of God were going up and down on it” (Gen 28:12).
Interpreters speculated about the significance of this ladder and the angels. Among other things, the phrase “up and down” aroused their curiosity, since angels are generally conceived to reside in heaven. Shouldn’t the angels have been going down the ladder first, and only after that, up again?
Various answers were proposed. One held that the angels in question were being punished. They must have been forbidden to return to their home in heaven because of a mistake they had made when God sent them to evacuate Lot and his family before the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 19). They had carried out their mission, but in so doing they had made a grave error. They told Lot to get his whole family out of the house, “since we are about to destroy this place” (Gen 19:13). But surely the angels were just messengers: it was God who was going to destroy the city. Taking credit for God’s deeds was a serious infraction, and the angels were condemned to walk the earth for a certain amount of time before being allowed back into heaven.
The day on which the angels’ punishment was complete turned out to be the very day on which Jacob arrived from Beer-sheba and reached the place of his dream. Climbing up the ladder, the angels called out to their colleagues in heaven: “Come down and see this righteous fellow Jacob! He’s sleeping at the foot of this ladder.” So, after their formerly exiled angels had gone up, a new group of angels went down to catch a glimpse of Jacob in person—hence, some angels went up while other angels went down.
But a quite different explanation was attributed to the rabbinic scholar Samuel ben Naḥman. According to his interpretation, there had been exactly four angels in Jacob’s dream. What sort of angels were they? The Torah says only that they were “angels of God,” and this might seem to imply that these were the very highest angels in heaven, the ones who serve before the heavenly throne. However, it was a well-known fact that every nation in the world has its own guardian angel and—said Rabbi Samuel b. Naḥman—it was four of these national angels that Jacob saw in his dream.
The first nation’s angel to climb up the ladder was the national angel of Babylon. It climbed up seventy rungs of the ladder and then went down again. Jacob understood at once what this meant: his descendants would be exiled and ruled by Babylon for seventy years. “Certainly not a happy prediction,” he must have thought, “but survivable.”
The next national angel to ascend was that of Persia and Media (who were traditionally joined). This angel climbed up fifty-two rungs and went down again—an additional fifty-two years of foreign domination of Jacob’s descendants. Then came more bad news: Greece’s angel went up and kept going for one hundred and eighty rungs!
But the worst national angel in this vision was the last one, the national angel of Rome. It went up, and up, and up, until Jacob cried out in despair: “O Lord, do You mean that this one will never come back down?” (Samuel ben Naḥman lived during the late third and early fourth century CE; by his time the Romans had been dominating Palestine for more than four hundred years.)
God reassured Jacob with a verse spoken by the prophet Obadiah: “Though you soar aloft like an eagle, and though your nest is set among the stars, from there I will bring you down, says the Lord” (Obad 1:4). This verse was spoken by Obadiah about the Edomites, Israel’s neighbor to the southeast. But by Samuel ben Naḥman’s day, everyone knew that “Edom” was often another name for Rome. The sense of God’s words was thus clear: “Even if you see him (Rome’s angel) reaching to the very heavens, I will still cause him to go down.” Jacob was reassured, although he knew that his descendants were still in for some tough times.
Shabbat shalom!
