(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)
“Behold, Yahweh stood above it, and said, “I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. I will give the land you lie on to you and to your offspring. Your offspring will be as the dust of the earth, and you will spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. In you and in your offspring, all the families of the earth will be blessed. Behold, I am with you, and will keep you, wherever you go, and will bring you again into this land. For I will not leave you until I have done that which I have spoken of to you.””
(Genesis 28:13-15)
THIS was the blessing everyone had been hoping for. This was the blessing of God that He gave Abraham and that He transferred to Isaac. Only God can give this blessing. It is not for humans to give or transmit. This is what God had promised Rebekah would happen. It happened in God’s time. At God’s location. In God’s way. All her efforts to force it caused nothing but trouble. It was always meant for Jacob and here Jacob receives it.
God is giving the Land. God is giving the produce of the Land. God is giving an inheritance that will pass onto further generations. And God is giving a solemn promise not to leave Jacob. To be with Him through all of it. Until the promise came to pass. Until Jacob had received all that Jacob had been promised. It took four generations, but God did not leave. God was with them through all of it. God kept the promise.
God included Messiah in this promise (Galatians 3:16). He did that so that His word could stand throughout ALL generations. So that He would be able to point to the promise as the reason that He was there with them. Not just for the Land, but for ALL people and ALL nations. God has been faithful. He has never abandoned us. He has been there until Jesus fulfilled the Messianic promise and in Jesus we can be with Him forever. God is faithful and true.
This blessing didn’t instantly alter Jacob’s personality. Jacob still struggled with deceit. He reaped a poor harvest from his actions. He went through a lot before he had come to a better place. Until he had accepted the Lord as his shepherd. He wasn’t being blessed because he had dome godly things or because he was a godly person. It wasn’t his efforts that brought this about.
The sage Rashi writes: ‘נצב עליו STOOD ABOVE HIM to guard him (Genesis Rabbah 69:3). ואלהי יצחק AND THE GOD OF ISAAC — Although we do not find in the Scriptures that God associates his Name with that of the righteous whilst they are yet alive by writing, “The God of so-and-so”, — because it is said (Job 15:15) “Behold He putteth no trust even in His holy ones” — here, however, He associated his Name with that of Isaac because his eyes had become dim and he was confined to the house, so that he might be regarded as dead and as though the evil inclination had already passed away from him and he was unlikely to sin any more (Midrash Tanchuma, Toldot 7). שכב עליה THE LAND WHEREON THOU LIEST — The Holy One, blessed be He, rolled together the entire Land of Israel under him, thus intimating to him that it would be as easily conquered by his descendants (Chullin 91b) as a piece of land four cubits in length, which is the space covered by a person lying down (see Rashi, Chullin 91b, and the note of the ב”ח thereon). ופרצת means AND THOU SHALT BECOME STRONG, like (Exodus 1:12) “the more they became strong”. אנכי עמך I AM WITH THEE — God promised him this because he was in terror of Esau and Laban. עד אשר אם עשיתי UNTIL I HAVE DONE — The word אם is here used in the sense of כי (cf. Gittin 90a). דברתי לך means I have spoken in thy interest and concerning thee: whatever I promised to Abraham regarding his seed it was in reference to you that I promised it and not in reference to Esau, for I did not say to him “Isaac shall be called thy seed” (which would have signified that all Isaac’s descendants would be regarded, also, as Abraham’s) but I said (21:12) ביצחק “In Isaac” and not all the issue of Isaac”. In the same way wherever לי or לך or לו or להם are used after a verbal form of דבר, they are used in the sense of “concerning”. This verse proves that this is so, since it cannot mean “I have spoken to thee” as He had never spoken to Jacob before this occasion.’
The sage Sforno writes: ‘והיה זרעך כעפר הארץ, ופרצת, after your descendants will have multiplied so that they are as the dust of the earth, numerically speaking, you will spread out. The expression is to be understood as similar to Isaiah 51,23: ותשימי כארץ גוך וכחוץ לעוברים, “so that you made your back like the ground, like a street for passers by.” Precisely when the Jewish people will have reached a seeming low point in their collective experience (downtrodden by the Egyptian taskmasters, or in later exiles) they will expand and become powerful in a measure never before seen on earth. ימה וקדמה צפונה ונגבה, when that time arrives Bileam’s prophecy in Numbers 24,17 וקרקר כל בני שת, “it will smash the foundation of all mankind.” The final redemption of the Jewish people will come after they have suffered the low point in their history. (Compare Sanhedrin 95: “if you see a generation experiencing so many persecutions and setbacks that it appears a raging river is inundating them, wait for the ending for the prophet Isaiah in his description of the redemption writes of it immediately after having described the very opposite in chapter 59, 19-20”). ונברכו בך כל משפחות האדמה ובזרעך, the same type of blessing mentioned in Isaiah 61,6 i.e. because you will then be known and revered as the priests of the Lord, they will receive their Divine blessing through you. כי לא אעזבך, when I said that after the exile you will expand in all directions of the globe, know no boundaries, this is possible only because even during the long years of exile I did not abandon you, as stated explicitly in Leviticus 26,44 לא מאסתים ולא געלתים, “I will not have rejected them, nor will I have abhorred them.” עד אשר אם עשיתי, as long as I have not carried out what I have said to you now. (i.e. the part commencing with ופרצת). There are occasions when the word עד is used in the sense of בעוד, such as Song of Songs 1,12 עד שהמלך במסבו, ”while the king was on his couch.” Or, Proverbs 8,26 עד לא עשה ארץ וחוצות, “while G’d had not yet made earth or even clumps of dust.” However, once G’d would have performed this great salvation, not only would He continue to treat His people with loving kindness by not abandoning them, but He would add a new dimension to it by walking among them, as promised in Leviticus 26,12 והתהלכתי בתוככם, “I will be walking amongst you (constantly).”’
The sage Rav Hirsch writes: ‘V. 14 בך — ובזרעך (just as before לך ולזרעך) “through thee all the families of the world shall be blessed, and through thy seed”. Quite definitely the blessing that is to emanate from him, appears here to be a double one. Altogether, one man and one nation can be the source of blessing for the whole human race only by spiritual influence, and the example of the development of a model exemplary mode of life, until the time comes when the phophecy will be fulfilled that בימים ההמה אשר יחזיקו עשרה אנשים מכל לשונות הגוים והחזיקו בכנף איש יהודי לאמר נלכה עמכם כי שמענו אלקים עמכם “in those days, that, when ten men from every language of the nations will seek security, they will catch hold of the garment of a Jewish man and say: we would go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zacc. 8,23). That is the blessing that Jacob, as a pater familias, and his seed as a nation, are to be to the world. Jacob demonstrates the first Jewish house, and teaches how, without נחלת אבותיו, without any inherited fortune, simply by the blessing and dignity of מלאכה, of work, one can build up, and live through a family life with all its drudgery, worries and griefs, and still have ה׳ נצב עליו, still not miss God in one’s life. Accordingly, it is family and national life, borne purely and entirely by the grace of God, and lived in accordance with the Divine Will, which mankind is to learn from you and from your seed. V. 15 והנה אנכי עמך. I (the God of Love to mankind) am with you, and although you take nothing with you but your staff, you have Me. To the grandson of Abraham it is not promised, as it was to Abraham ואברכך ואגדלה שמך, he is going into Galut. What is promised to him is שמירה, protection, and ultimate return. In exactly the same way as in the future, when his people will leave the same land and wander out in exile. — לא אעזבך, I will work on you for so long, so long will I occupy Myself with your fate until you will have become what you should become, and then, through you, all families of the world will be blessed.’
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