A Bible Study by the only people truly qualified to study the bible — those who don't believe.

Jacob's Ladder

Rebekah, having ordered Jacob to cheat his brother and deceive his father, is now afraid for him.  I’m not sure what she actually thought would happen.  Hugs and kisses?  Knowing Esau will kill him, she tells Jacob to flee to her brother’s house. Thinking quickly, she goes to Isaac and whines about the quality of all these damned Hittite women, exclaiming loudly how terrible it would be if Jacob married one.  Therefore, Jacob is commanded by dad to go back to their old kin and find a wife among them.

You have to wonder if Isaac knew why she wanted Jacob to leave?  He couldn’t have been so stupid that he couldn’t see through her ruse.  It had only been a short while since the deception.  But old, senile or just slow, maybe he couldn’t. Please remember this was the man fooled by a son in goat fur into giving his highly prized Special Blessing to the wrong person.  But maybe Isaac did know and just wanted Jacob out of his sight.  I mean, he can’t have been happy with him, and I have to admit, the little shit head had it coming.

I also find it fascinating how much they disparage the Canaanite women. Why live there when they seem to detest everyone around them?  Yeah, yeah, God told Abraham to move there but come on!  If you don’t like the neighborhood… With no good women in the vicinity, when they need a wife, they must travel for weeks to marry their allegedly unbeatable first cousins. Could they really be that hot?  Hotter that all the local women?  In fact, the only time any of them seem to see their kin at all is when they make the long journey back to marry one. Poor Esau-the-Impulsive made a mistake when he married two Canaanites causing much distress to his family.  He only made that better by making his third wife a first cousin.  WTF?

So Jacob sets off and on his way has a dream.  He stops for the night and grabs a rock to lay his head on.  After using this stone for a pillow, I can understand why he had a rather odd dream.  It’s of a stairway or ladder from earth to heaven with God’s messengers going to and fro. I’m not sure where all these messengers were going.  Olympus?  Asgard?  Nirvana?   As a bit-o trivia, this is where the term Jacob’s Ladder originates.  If we can find few ethical lessons within this book, at least we have the potential to learn literature.

In the dream God himself is standing next to Jacob and again promises him the whole shebang, lands aplenty, descendants like dust, spread all over the earth, and so on.

Jacob wakes up dazed and head sore from the stone pillow and says

Doesn’t this imply that he wasn’t before?  Was Jacob really into Zeus and Apollo before this?  Nurse a secret lust for Athena?  The problem here is that it takes so little for him to believe so much.  I think he should demand a bit more proof than having a odd dream and surviving a minor journey to believe in an invisible all-powerful guy in the sky. Why not ask for something truly unique?    Something that can’t be replicated by chance. But what does God ever offer?  A dream? A burning bush?  I can freakin’ burn a bush for Pete’s sake. I want a rain of silver to fall from the sky.  I want fountains of gold to spring out of the ground at my feet. I want…, a mountain of twinkies.  Yeah baby,  then I’d believe!

Isn’t this one of humanity’s weaknesses.  We  want to believe in absurdities so badly that we set our standards at ankle level, low enough for any sign to qualify.  I found a four-leaf clover.  The sun came up today.  God must love me. Meteors haven’t destroyed my house.  I haven’t spontaneously combusted.  God still must love me.

I lost my leg in a freak bowling accident.  I lost all four limbs to a lawn mower run amok.  God still loves me, right?   Right??  God??  Hello?  Anyone?  Anyone?  WTF?

Damn, I just talked myself into felling sorry for these people.

Sigh!