What is Jacob’s ladder?

A runaway’s dream

Jacob has just stolen his brother’s blessing, and Esau has sworn to kill him. He leaves Beersheba alone, heading north to his uncle in Haran. At sunset he stops at “a certain place,” takes one of its stones to put under his head and lies down in the open (Genesis 28:10–11).

He dreamed and saw a stairway set upon the earth, and its top reached to heaven. Behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

Above it stands Yahweh, who repeats to the runaway the promise made to Abraham: this land, offspring like the dust of the earth, a blessing for every family on it. Then he adds something new for a man leaving home: “I am with you, and will keep you, wherever you go” (28:15).

Ladder or stairway?

The Hebrew word is sullam, and it appears only here in the Bible. It seems to come from a root meaning to heap up, as for a ramp or a raised road. Many scholars compare the Akkadian simmiltu, a staircase, and picture the stepped side of a ziggurat, a Mesopotamian temple tower. Jacob’s own words point the same way. He calls the place “the gate of heaven” (28:17), and Babylon’s name, Bab-ili, meant gate of the god.

The echo runs back to Babel, whose builders wanted a tower “whose top reaches to the sky” (Genesis 11:4). There, people try to climb up to heaven. At Bethel, heaven comes down to a man asleep on the ground.

Why “ladder,” then? The Greek Septuagint used klimax and the Latin Vulgate scala, words that can mean either, and the King James Bible chose ladder. Many modern versions, the World English Bible among them, say stairway.

Up first, then down

The rabbis noticed the order: the angels go up before they come down. Rashi explained that the angels who had guarded Jacob in the land of Israel were going home, while others came down to travel with him abroad. A midrash notes that the Hebrew for “on it” can also mean “on him”: the angels climb up to gaze at Jacob’s likeness, engraved on high, and come down to find him asleep (Genesis Rabbah 68:12).

The house of God

Jacob awakened out of his sleep, and he said, “Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I didn’t know it.” He was afraid, and said, “How awesome this place is! This is none other than God’s house, and this is the gate of heaven.”

He sets up his stone pillow as a pillar, pours oil on it and renames the town of Luz Bethel, “house of God” (28:18–19). Then he makes a careful vow: if God brings him home in peace, he will give a tenth of everything. Bethel became one of Israel’s great shrines. Centuries later King Jeroboam set a golden calf there (1 Kings 12:29).

The ladder after Genesis

In John’s Gospel, Jesus greets Nathanael as “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit,” a nod to Jacob, who deceived his way into the blessing. Then he borrows the dream.

hereafter you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

Christians read it as Jesus himself becoming the stairway between heaven and earth. In the seventh century John Climacus, an abbot on Mount Sinai, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent, thirty rungs of the spiritual life; his byname comes from klimax. The image climbs on through the spiritual “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” and William Blake’s spiral staircase of light, and English still gives the name Jacob’s ladder to a ship’s rope ladder.