Genesis 28 Study Notes

28:10-15 Jacob started northward on the approximately five-hundred-mile journey to Haran. At the end of one of his first days he stopped in central Palestine and camped outdoors. That night God appeared to him. Perhaps the stairway (a better translation than “ladder”) he dreamed of was a supernatural version of humanity’s Tower of Babylon (11:4), with God’s angels—and not sinful humans—using it to commute from heaven to earth. In the dream the Lord transferred to Jacob all the essential elements of the promises given originally to Abraham and Isaac.

Key features from Abraham’s era include the gift of land (12:7; 13:17); the promise of offspring as numerous as the dust of the earth (cp. 13:16); and peoples being blessed through Jacob and his offspring (cp. 12:3; 18:18). As with his father Isaac, God promised he would be with him wherever he went (26:24) and bring him back to the promised land.

28:16-19 No other person in the OT is recorded as anointing a sacred stone; Jacob would do it twice (35:14). Jacob renamed the site Bethel (“House of God”), a name that would be retained throughout Israelite history (Jdg 1:23; Neh 11:31).

28:20-22 Jacob is the only patriarch to make a vow. Though his words can appear selfish, the vow may simply contain a request that God would carry out the implications of the promises made in v. 15. Years later Jacob would confess that God had indeed kept the terms of his promises (35:3).