Jacob's Ladder

Reflections on the Lectionary for July 23rd

Illustration from an early Luther Bible, ca 1530s. Captured by LZB in Flensberg, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Image from Wikipedia.

It can be hard to remember, in our days of endless streaming options, that our viewing choices were once limited to the things that came on the television, when they came on. Or, in extraordinary cases, we might have been able to watch something on VHS—either a recording bought or rented from a store, or something bootlegged from a live broadcast.

The latter was the case one summer in the early 1990s when I was spending time at my grandparents’ house in southwestern North Carolina. They had taped all of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary the previous fall, straight from the TV, complete with the Georgia Public Television fundraising pleas, and it sat there by the 20-inch TV in a set of black VHS tapes. Their house had lots of woods to play in during the day, but at night there wasn’t a lot to do besides read. So on a series of evenings that summer, I watched all of Ken Burns’ Civil War.

That series made an enormous impression on me. I have been meaning to rewatch it, perhaps with my kids, who are now about the age I was when I saw it. I am certain that they would not be enthusiastic about the idea, since they have access to more video content than anyone could ever view in one lifetime, much of which is more exciting than a multi-hour history documentary. But there is something important, I think, about encountering history in such an exhaustive and honest way. Maybe one of these days I’ll make my way through it again.

I remember sitting on my grandparents’ sofa, watching an episode, when a song began to play. It was haunting, beautiful, and like nothing I had ever heard. I came to learn that the lead singer of the group of women behind the song was Bernice Johnson Reagon, best known as the leader of the group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and that the song was titled We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder. A couple of years later when I started buying CDs from those mail-order businesses that were popular in the 90s, I checked the box for the album The Civil War, the soundtrack for the series. It was a strange choice, perhaps, for a teenager. But I became obsessed with the album and with some of the songs on it, none as much as We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder. Even through college and after, the album had a place in my rotation alongside other more conventional teenaged fare. I got some funny looks from people in the college dorms, listening to music from the 1800s.

I would later learn that the song had a deep history as a spiritual, sung as a working song by enslaved people in the American south. The call-and-response patterns of the song made for a rhythmic accompaniment to labor, easily sung alongside work. As a religious song, it also made its way into church settings—first in Black church settings, and then, in the 20^th century, in white churches too. It even entered the musical mainstream for a moment; I have a vinyl record on which Pete Seeger sings a version of it. But nothing before or since, in my opinion, can match Reagon’s rendition.

The deepest roots of the song, of course, are in the book of Genesis—in the text from Genesis 28 that appears in the lectionary this week. There, we follow the journey of Jacob, who is still at this point a young man, as he travels toward the house of Laban his kinsman to find a wife (or two). Jacob is an absolutely captivating figure. His life dominates ten chapters of Genesis, from 25 to 35, in a set of stories that scholars call the “Jacob Cycle.” Libraries of books could be (and have been) written about Jacob and all of the beautiful strangeness of his stories, and the ways his influence was felt even long after his life was over. (When Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, it’s not just any well—it’s Jacob’s well). He seems to have had a special connection to the divine, and his story includes several spooky and mysterious encounters with divine or semi-divine figures.

In this story, Jacob stops for the night to sleep, in the middle of his journey, and he begins to dream. His dream is of a ladder—or a stairway, a ramp, or, some scholars suggest, a ziggurat—from the earth up to heaven. The dream implies a flattening of the difference between heaven and earth, or at least a permeability of the barrier between them. In fancy academic terms, this is a theophany—an appearance of God. The Hebrew Bible is full of theophanies, but Jacob seems to have a knack for them. In this case, after he wakes up, Jacob concludes that “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it…this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” He names the spot Bethel, which is a very literalistic name meaning just what Jacob had just said: “house of God.”

The elision between heaven and earth might be part of the appeal of the folk song that Reagon sang on the Civil War documentary and soundtrack. As a song that originated before recording devices, there can be a lot of variation to the lyrics from one version to the next. But if I had to summarize them, I would say that the words of the song are aspirational, about the potential for improving one’s lot and persevering in the face of trouble. The climbing metaphor gives the song an ascending quality, suggesting movement from this world’s troubles to a happier and easier place.

Vincent Harding, the writer, activist, and academic who spent twenty years on the faculty at the Iliff School of Theology where I now work, often asked audiences to join in singing a new stanza of the song. “We are (we are) building (building) up a new world; builders must be strong.” At Iliff, we still sing that verse of the song sometimes at gatherings like convocations and commencements. It’s remarkable, the kind of exegesis that can flow out of a set of lyrics. The authors of Genesis could not have anticipated the way a song twenty-five or thirty centuries later would begin from the story of Jacob and take on a whole range of new meanings for people in many different circumstances.

At the end of this story, Jacob takes the stone that he had used for a pillow the night before, and consecrates it by pouring oil on it, and set it up as a standing stone to mark the place. This might be a reference to a cultic site that flourished at Bethel in antiquity, giving an explanation for how that site came to exist. But the story also works on a simpler level, as a way of marking place and commemorating an important encounter with the divine. That seems to be the most central meaning of this strange tale—that Jacob came away from the dream with an understanding that heaven was not so far away, and that he wanted to keep the passageway there open. All those who have climbed Jacob’s ladder ever since have been looking for something similar—for the presence of the divine in their lives and a pathway to find their way back.