Ascending and Descending

The description of the angels on Jacob’s ladder has long been a puzzle: They are “ascending and descending” (Genesis 28). Since angels come from heaven to earth, shouldn’t it be the opposite? Shouldn’t they come down before they go up?

Yitzhak Pegel suggests a solution in his Going Up and Going Down. He suggests that sullam, often translated as “ladder” and understood as a ziggurat, can also mean a road or way. It hints, he argues, at “the way connecting Israel with the lands of exile. It distances or brings one closer to the dwelling place of God, depending on the direction taken” (96). In support, he cites Isaiah 40:3 (using mesillah) and 2 Chronicles 9:11.

From this, he suggests that the interpretation of the dream encompasses the whole Jacob narrative and the entirety of the Patriarchal history. The entire dream is about journeys along the way, toward God and away from him. And the angels on the “way/ladder” “symbolize the Patriarchs” (107).

He elaborates, “the angels on the one hand represent God, while on the other, in the language of enigma and symbolism, they also represent or symbolize not just Jacob the dreamer but also Abraham and Isaac – hence the appearance in the plural. . . . The heavens on the symbolic plan represent the Promised Land and the place where God dwells. . . . The earth symbolizes the lands of exile. . . . The ladder . . . is the symbol or metaphor for the way to and from the Land of Canaan, between heaven and earth, the road the Patriarchs took and will take again – from Adam Naharayim and Haram to Canaan, and back, and te descent into Egypt” (108). The reason the angels ascend before they descend is because they are the patriarchs, for ascending to the land and then descending to Egypt (109).

One of the virtues of this unusual reading is that it connects the dream to Jacob’s immediate circumstance: He is a descendant of those who “ascending” and he is about to “descend” from the land into exile. It also explains the link between the dream and the land promise that God reiterates at Bethel.