Questions — Vayeitzei
28:10-22
Why is there no sense that Jacob had an urgency to flee from Esau?
Who uses a stone for a pillow? Is this an idea of having a firm foundation for his dreaming? Odd behavior leads to odd metaphors.
Makom is one of the names of God. Can we see this usage (v. 11) as referring to God or not? New JPS translated this as “a certain place.” Why not “in that place,” or “in the place.”
Midrash imagines that this staircase fits into the geography of the land of Israel is a somewhat normative way and leads a great distance into the north (obviously not a spiral staircase - issues of modesty I guess). Angelic creatures have different descriptions in Tanakh and Apocrypha. How would you visualize these angles and this staircase? What does reaching to the sky mean? Does it mean reaching beyond the limits of visual observation? Is there a top to this ladder that can be seen? Are the angels passing each other in an orderly way or are their transits more casual? It is understood that angels have only one purpose or mission, and yet in midrash we hear about their disagreements and resistances to Divine intentions? Are they then tightly or loosely disciplined in their actions?
New JPS translates nitzav as “standing” by him, but it is usually better translated in the somewhat less embodied way, “stationed by.” The difficulty of the issue of an anthropomorphized God is always there, so why push it forward by choosing the word “standing?”
When God first speaks to Abraham we know his genealogy, his location on the map and that his father had died. Nothing that we know about Abraham has any detail of the specific moment or of any recent detail that would give us any sense of who Abraham (Avram) is in that moment. We also have no sense of how God might have been perceived. When God is revealed to Jacob the revelation comes in a dream as a very specific moment in Jacob’s life and in a place that the text means for us to consider to be specific. Why are there no such “annunication” scenes in the life of Abraham and Isaac? Is there an annunciation scene in the life of Joseph. There certainly are in the life of Moses and in the lives of some of the kings and many of the prophets.
Why is Jacob’s genealogy phrased oddly? God refers to Abraham as Jacob’s father and does not use any word to describe Jacob’s relationship to Isaac? Why are Abraham and Isaac split into two clauses and not united as one?
