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11 A nighttime vision, a UFO sighting, and the appearance of angels come together in one of the most intriguing dream reports in the Bible, known as Jacob's Dream. It was a most significant Divine Encounter, for in it Yahweh himself vowed to protect Jacob, the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, to bless him and his seed, and to give the Promised Land to him and his descendants forever. The circumstances leading to this Divine Encounter, in which Jacob—in a vision—saw the Angels of the Lord in action, were the journey of Jacob from Canaan, where the amily had settled, to Harran, where other members of the amily of Abraham had stayed on when Abraham continued southward toward the Sinai and Egypt. Concerned lest his son Jacob, with whom the divinely ordained succession rested, marry a pagan Canaanite, "Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and ordered him thus: Thou shalt not take a wife rom the daughters of Canaan; arise, go to Padan-Aram, to the house of Bethuel thy mother's father, and take thyself rom there a wife from among the daughters of Laban, thy mother's brother." Harran, it will be recalled, was a way station (which is what its name meant) on the northern route from Mesopota- mia to the Mediterranean lands and thence to Egypt. It was there that Abraham stayed with his father Terah before he was ordered to proceed southward; and it was there that Esar- haddon (some fifteen hundred years later) received the oracle 248 son ANGELS AND OTHER EMISSARIES