Jacob

" Jacob is said to have come together with several, being interpreted "the exerciser" (and the exercises are by many and differing doctrines);

"the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.

but sons of Jacob are his elect, those who have tripped up the working of evil.

The same will be also elsewhere a bull, in the same Scripture, when Jacob is spiritually interpreted concerning Simeon and Levi, that is, concerning the scribes and Pharisees — for from them is derived the descent of these men.

For concerning Jacob — who is the figure of the later and preferred people, that is, of us — the first promise is of the dew of heaven, the second of earthly fatness.

For among those figures and prophetic blessings of Jacob upon his sons, when he had said to Benjamin, Benjamin, he says, a ravening wolf shall feed in the morning, and at evening shall give food — for he foresaw that Paul would arise from the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf feeding in the morning, that is, in his early age laying waste the flock of the Lord as a persecutor of the churches, and …

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob — not of Esau, the elder son, but of Jacob, the later, that is, of our people, whose mountain is Christ, cut out without the hands of those who hew, filling all the earth, as shown in Daniel.

When Jacob extended his blessing upon Simeon and Levi, he prophesies concerning the scribes and the Pharisees;

that Isaac was oppressed, and Jacob the patriarch was a sojourner;

here is the heaven-bearing ladder, and the encampments of the angels that appeared to Jacob;

but the families of Jacob’s children hold together and become a people.

Jacob, in making a particular bequest to Joseph above his brethren, says, “I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword, and with my bow.

For these, being descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, sojourned in Egypt.

"I saw," says Jacob, "God face to face, and my soul was saved.

And in the first place, the very preface of John the evangelist at once shows what he was formerly who was to be made flesh.

But this too is from the old sacrament, by which Jacob blessed his grandsons by Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, with hands laid on their heads and crossed, and indeed so crossed athwart each other that, prefiguring Christ, they portended even then the blessing that should be in Christ.

You have read at some time, and believed, that the Creator's angels were changed into human form, and carried so great a reality of body that Abraham even washed their feet, and that Lot was rescued by their hands from the Sodomites, and that an angel even wrestled with a man so bodily, with the whole weight of his frame, that he begged to be let go, so was he held fast.

and this too is the ladder which Jacob dreams of, showing to some an ascent into the higher places, to others a descent to the lower.

But Paul the apostle, of a persecutor — who first shed the blood of the Church — afterwards changing the sword for the pen and turning the falchion into a ploughshare, "a ravening wolf of Benjamin," thereafter himself bringing food, according to Jacob — how does he commend martyrdoms as now even to be desired by himself!

but Jacob toiled fourteen years for Rachel, and a nineteenth-century Englishman is not less steadfast and persevering where the reward is love.