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In Genesis, Jacob dreams of a stairway whose top reaches heaven, with angels ascending and descending. The Christian theologian Irenaeus interprets it as the cross, calling it the tree set up from earth to heaven on which believers go up to the heavens.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 28:12
Hebrew Bible
11 He reached a certain place where he decided to camp because the sun had gone down. He took one of the stones and placed it near his head. Then he fell asleep in that place 12 and had a dream. He saw a stairway erected on the earth with its top reaching to the heavens. The angels of God were going up and coming down it 13 and the Lord stood at its top. He said, “I am the Lord, the God of your grandfather Abraham and the God of your father Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the ground you are lying on.
Irenaeus Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 46
Early Christian
45 And Jacob, when he went into Mesopotamia, saw Him in a dream, standing upon the ladder, that is the tree which was set up from earth to heaven; for thereby they that believe on Him go up to the heavens. For His sufferings are our ascension on high. And all such visions point to the Son of God, speaking with men and being in their midst. For it was not the Father of all, who is not seen by the world, the Maker of all who has said: Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me, or what is the place of my rest? And who comprehendeth the earth with his hand, and with his span the heaven—it was not He that came and stood in a very small space and spake with Abraham; but the Word of God, who was ever with mankind, and made known beforehand what should come to pass in the future, and taught men the things of God.
Date: 175-190 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
“... The moral-allegorical interpretation just mentioned is repeated in Christianity, as a general determination of piety and asceticism as well as an allusion to the infinite ascent of the soul to God described in the Beatitudes. Ephraem the Syrian in one of his ‘Hymns on the Feast of Epiphany’ compares Jesus on the day of his baptism in the Jordan with Jacob’s ladder, because he united the water on earth with the gate of heaven. Where the ladder symbolizes the cross of Christ, the soteriological or the ethical aspect of the cross can be in the foreground. ...”
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