Genesis28chapter 28

Genesis 28:1-2

The charge is the one Abraham laid on his servant in chapter 24, the same refusal of a Canaanite wife and the same house of Bethuel at the end of the road. What differs is the sending. Abraham sent a servant with ten camels and a load of gifts to fetch a bride for Isaac, and Isaac sends the heir himself with what Jacob later says was only his staff.

Genesis 28:3-4

What Jacob took by fraud in the previous chapter, with a kid's skin and his brother's clothes, is handed to him openly here and called by its name, the blessing of Abraham. Isaac speaks it this time knowing which son stands in front of him. The land is promised to a man the same verse calls a stranger in it, which is how the patriarchs hold Canaan the whole way through Genesis, since the only ground any of them owns there is the cave Abraham bought for four hundred shekels to bury Sarah in.

Genesis 28:5-7

The verse names Rebekah as the mother of Jacob and Esau in that order, the younger son first, which is the order the book has kept since Abel. Verse 7 says that Jacob obeyed his father and his mother, said of the son who had deceived them both one chapter earlier. Rebekah had told him to stay with Laban a few days until his brother's anger turned; he is gone twenty years, and Genesis never records that she saw him again.

Genesis 28:8-9

Esau answers his father's complaint by adding a wife rather than by parting with the ones he had, and the wife he adds is a daughter of Ishmael, the son who was himself passed over in chapter 17. Two set-aside lines marry. Clarke reads the move as a sincere attempt to please his parents, while Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read it as reform without repentance, since the text says nothing of his changing his mind about killing his brother.

Genesis 28:10-11

He leaves Beersheba, where Abraham had planted a grove and called on the everlasting God and where his own father had built an altar, and he goes out alone. He stops where he stops because the sun had set rather than because the spot meant anything to him, and he sleeps with stones under his head. That patch of dirt is the ground he is about to be promised in the next verse.

Genesis 28:12

The angels go up before they come down, so they were already here when the dream began. Genesis gives the dream without a line of explanation, and John's Gospel supplies one when Jesus tells Nathanael he will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, which puts him where the ladder stands. Ambrose read the descending band as angels coming down to Christ on earth, and Henry took the ladder for the whole traffic between heaven and earth since the fall.

Genesis 28:13-14

God speaks the covenant to Jacob in person for the first time, and this is the third generation to hear the same three things, the land, a seed past counting, and all the families of the earth blessed in him. Abram heard it at 12:1-3 and Isaac at 26:3-4, and each time it came with no condition attached to it. Nothing is said here about the stolen blessing or the lie told to a blind father, and no terms are set on the man lying on the ground.

Genesis 28:15

The promise to bring him back is the one clause Jacob is in a position to test, and God recalls it to him twenty years later at 31:13, naming himself the God of Bethel where thou anointedst the pillar. He does come again into this land, at 33:18 and again at 35:1, when he is sent back to live at this very place. The words I am with thee are what Abimelech's men said they had seen over Isaac at 26:28.

Genesis 28:16-17

He had slept a whole night in the place before he knew where he was, and what he feels on finding out is fear rather than comfort. Two names come out of him at once, the house of God and the gate of heaven, and the second one says there is a door here and he is standing outside it. Hosea points back to this night when he says God found him in Bethel, and there he spake with us.

Genesis 28:18-19

The pillow becomes a pillar, and the oil poured over the top of it makes the stone a consecrated thing rather than a marker of where he slept. He stands at this stone again in 35:14 and pours oil on it a second time after God sends him back, and pillars become his habit, at Galeed with Laban and over Rachel's grave. Jerome notes that the town's old name Luz means nut or almond, and Cyril of Alexandria read the anointed stone as a figure of the one anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows.

Genesis 28:20-21

Every item Jacob asks for had been promised to him five verses earlier without a condition on it, so the vow reads like a man bargaining for what he has already been handed. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown argue that the if should be read as since, an expression of faith rather than a term of trade, while Henry points at the modesty of the request, bread and raiment from an heir to the whole land. The hesitation shows most in the last clause, since a man who has just heard God name himself is still saying then shall the LORD be my God.

Genesis 28:22

This is the second tenth in Genesis, after Abram gave one to Melchizedek at 14:20, and both are given long before any law asked for one. Jacob keeps the half of the vow about the stone, since he returns at 35:7, builds an altar at the place and calls it El-bethel. Genesis never reports him paying the tenth.