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23 July 2022 - 6 August 2022 Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
The text below is adapted from JPS.
1 And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and instructed him, and said to him, You shall not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan. 2 Arise, go to Paddan Aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother's father, and take yourself a wife from there of the daughters of Laban your mother's brother. 3 And may El Shaddai bless you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, that you may be a congregation of peoples; 4 and give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your seed with you; that you may inherit the land of your sojournings, which God gave to Abraham.
5 And Isaac sent away Jacob, and he went to Paddan Aram to Laban, son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob's and Esau's mother. 6 Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan Aram, to take himself a wife from there, and that as he blessed him he gave him instruction, saying, You shall not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan; 7 and that Jacob listened to his father and his mother, and had gone to Paddan Aram. 8 And Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan did not please Isaac his father, 9 so Esau went to Ishmael, and took alongside the wives that he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, the sister of Nebaioth, to be his wife.
10 And Jacob went out from Beer Sheba, and went toward Haran. 11 And he came upon a certain place, and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. 12 And he dreamed, and saw a ladder set up on the earth, its top reaching the sky, and saw angels of God going up and going down on it.
13 And there stood Y', beside him, and said, I am Y', the god of Abraham your father, and the god of Isaac. The land where you lie, to you I will give it, and to your seed. 14 And your seed will be as the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. 15 And behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back into this land, because I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
16 And Jacob awoke from his sleep, and said, Surely Y' is in this place, and I did not know it.
17 And he was afraid, and said, How full of awe is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of the sky. 18 And Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on the top of it. 19 And he called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was called Luz at first.
20 And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and clothing to put on, 21 so that I come back to my father's house in peace, then Y' will become my god. 22 And this stone which I have set up as a pillar will be God's house, and of all that you shall give me I will surely give a tenth to you.
[Verses after this are missing. I probably will not fill out this page, but will eventually absorb it into my other work on Genesis.]
(28:11) "And he came upon a certain place". Hebrew wypgʔ bmqwm, which according to the traditional Masoretic Pronunciation would be read wayyifgaʔ bammaqom. The second word bammaqom, is the part translated here as upon a certain place. The b- is read here as "upon", while the -am-, consisting of a vowel a and a doubling of the m, is the article, the Hebrew grammatical particle roughly correspond to "the" in English. And maqom is "place".
Now, the JPS reads -ammaqom as "the place". However, the KJV, NRSV, and NJPS all read here "a certain place". On the other hand, the term maqom is sometimes used particularly of a sacred place (Dillmann, HALOT), and so Dillmann would prefer here to read ammaqom as "the (sacred) spot".
(28:13) "beside him". The Hebrew expression can also be read as "above it".
(28:19) "Bethel". Hebrew for "House of El".
Dillmann, A. (1897). Genesis: Critically and Exegetically Expounded. Translated from the last edition by Wm. B. Stevenson. Volume II: Genesis 12-50.
HALOT. The standard Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament.
JPS. The Jewish Publication Society Bible of 1917. It can be found online here on Google Books or here alongside the Hebrew Bible at Mechon Mamre. I consider the claim that Larry Nelson has copyright to the online text spurious, but as I am not a legal expert, I have erred on the side of caution and used a facsimile of the print version for my purposes.
KJV. The King James Version, known in England as the Authorised Version, which was for about three hundred years virtually the standard Bible for English-speakers.
NJPS. The New Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible. In this case, I am using the text as it can be found on the Tagged Tanakh website.
NRSV. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, a well-known Bible often used by academics. In this case, I am using the text as it can be found on the "oremus Bible Browser" website.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
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