Jacob is a fugitive. He has just stolen his brother's blessing, and Esau wants him dead. He flees north toward Haran with nothing but a staff, and the sun sets on him in open country. Moses tells this story to Israelites who themselves know what it is to sleep in the wilderness with enemies behind them. The point is not Jacob's piety — he has none yet. The point is that God shows up to him anyway, in a place he did not know was holy, on a night he did not choose.

From the writers we read together

Michael S. Heiser

biblical scholar, author of The Unseen Realm

Heiser argued that the biblical writers thought of certain locations as cosmic geography — not because the soil was magical, but because God had chosen to make the seam between heaven and earth visible there. Bethel is one of these. Jacob does not climb the stairway; he watches angelic traffic on it. The realms are not sealed off from each other. They are working together, and Jacob has been allowed, for one night, to see the working.

What unsettles Heiser's reader is the line: Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it. Jacob has been walking on contested ground his whole life and never noticed. The text is not flattering to him. It is honest about us. The unseen realm does not wait for our awareness to be active. The angels were already on the stairway when Jacob lay down with a rock under his head. They will be on it when you lay down tonight.