Genèse 28

¹So Isaac sent for Jacob and blessed him, and gave him this charge: “Do not take any Canaanite woman as your wife. ²Set out now for Paddan-aram, to the household of your mother’s father Bethuel, and find yourself a wife there among the daughters of your uncle Laban. ³May God Almighty bless you, give you children and make them many, until you grow into a whole gathering of peoples. ⁴May he give you and your descendants the blessing he gave Abraham, so that you will possess the land where you now live as a foreigner, the land God gave to Abraham.” ⁵Then Isaac sent Jacob on his way, and he set out for Paddan-aram, to Laban son of Bethuel the Aramean. Laban was the brother of Rebekah, the mother of Jacob and Esau. ⁶Esau learned that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him to Paddan-aram to find a wife there, and that when he blessed him he had told him, “Do not marry a Canaanite woman,” ⁷and that Jacob had done what his father and mother told him and gone to Paddan-aram. ⁸It was clear to Esau, then, that his father Isaac did not approve of Canaanite women, ⁹so he went to Ishmael’s family and, besides the wives he already had, took as his wife Mahalath, the daughter of Abraham’s son Ishmael and sister of Nebaioth.

¹⁰Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. ¹¹He came to a certain place and stopped there for the night, because the sun had gone down. Taking one of the stones from there, he put it by his head and lay down to sleep in that place. ¹²He dreamed, and there before him was a stairway standing on the ground, its top touching the sky, with God’s angels climbing up and coming down on it.^{a 13}There above it stood the LORD, and he said, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and of Isaac. To you and to your descendants I will give the ground you are lying on.^{b 14}Your descendants will be as countless as the dust of the earth, and you will burst out westward and eastward, northward and southward. Through you and your descendants, all the families of the earth will receive blessing. ¹⁵I am with you. I will guard you everywhere you go and bring you back to this land. I will not abandon you before I have done all I told you I would do.” ¹⁶When Jacob woke from sleep, he said, “The LORD is truly here in this place, and I had no idea!” ¹⁷He was filled with fear and said, “What a fearsome place this is! This is God’s own house, and here is the doorway into heaven.” ¹⁸Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed by his head, stood it upright as a sacred pillar, and poured oil over its top. ¹⁹He named that place Bethel, though the town had been called Luz before. ²⁰Then Jacob made a vow: “If God stays with me and protects me on the road I am traveling, and provides me with food to eat and clothes to put on, ²¹and I come back safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God,^{c 22}and this stone I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house. And of everything you give me, I will give a tenth back to you.”