Jacob

Meaning

Jacob enters this passage through his ladder, one of several Old Testament figures invoked before the author’s comparison of Christ with the earthly Stone. The ladder is not separately decoded into laboratory stages. Its role is to establish that divine revelation already used bodily images before the proposed natural likeness. The English “Jacob’s ladder” follows the source’s possessive phrase exactly in sense. Placed beside Isaac’s sacrifice, Joseph’s fortunes and other scriptural examples, it supports the legitimacy of figurative teaching, while the paragraph reserves its central attention for Christ as the highest and hardest mystery to understand.