101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Founders 143
give all the land of Canaan to Jacob, the heir to Abraham and Isaac’s covenant. When
he awoke, Jacob declared that this spot must be the house of God and the gate to
heaven. There he built and consecrated an altar and named the site Beth-el, which
means“House of God.”
The dream appears in an ambiguous context. Isaac, described as old and blind and
about one hundred years of age, had just given Jacob his blessing. Esau declared that
the days of mourning for his father were at hand, implying that Isaac was near death.
Curiously, Isaac makes only one more brief and minor appearance in the Bible. Some
twenty years after Jacob fled, he went to visit Isaac, who would be about the age of one
hundred and twenty years. The verse doesn’t actually say that Jacob saw Isaac, nor
does it attribute any action to Isaac. In the very next verse, the Bible says that Isaac died
at the age of one hundred and eighty.
These last two verses about Isaac come from the E source. The previous stories
about Jacob and Esau and their conflicts belong to the J source. This suggests that in
the J source, Isaac died shortly after the blessing. Only in the E source does the father
survive, and those mentions encompass only two minor verses that were added at
a later time.
Jacob’s dream, therefore, occurs in the following context. He has just received the
blessing from his father; his father died shortly afterwards; he dreamed about a ladder
to heaven; and he became the new heir to God’s covenant.
Keeping this setting in mind, let’s look at some excerpts from the Pyramid Texts of
ancient Egypt, dating to the period from about 2500 B.C. to 2100 B.C. From the Fifth
dynasty pyramid of Pharaoh Unas, we read:
Ra setteth upright the ladder for Osiris, and Horus raiseth up the ladder for his
father Osiris, when Osiris goeth to [find] his soul; one standeth on the one side, and
the other standeth on the other, and Unas is betwixt them. Unas standeth up and is
Horus, he sitteth down and he is Set.
And, from the Sixth Dynasty pyramid of Pepi I:
Hail to thee, O Ladder of God, Hail to thee, O Ladder of Set. Stand up O Ladder
of God, stand up O Ladder of Set, stand up O Ladder of Horus, whereon Osiris
went forth into heaven.