The Time of Jacob's Trouble - Introduction
The original Jacob got in trouble when he moved to Egypt back in that day. The word trouble occurs before that here:
"Simeon and Levi put them all to death by the sword and rescued their
sister Dinah, and their brothers plundered the property, women, and
children. Jacob condemned this act, saying "You have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land."[16]
He later rebuked his sons for their anger in his deathbed blessing
(Genesis 49:5-7)." Jacob's Trouble later traveled to Babylon, if the
passage in Jeremiah (30.7) suggests Jacob's Trouble made tribulation with a capital T, looked at both
ways, as trouble, but as deliverance from trouble. Jeremiah associates
this with birth pains in a man, which got a capital T. Those leaps of
the rational divides associated the return from exile for Jacob and
repossession of the land with similar metaphors in Matthew (24.6-8) and I Thessalonians (5.3) with the end of time. The metaphor of birth pangs
associated with the phrase Jacob's Trouble beget the Tribulation. Speaking of the deliverance from Babylon, but it happened again in
Rome's destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah says, "It will be a time of
trouble for Jacob but he will be saved out of it" (Jeremiah 30.7), "a time of no ordinary calamity, but of great evil and misery, in the same sense as it is called a great day, Joel 2:11, great and terrible; and Zephaniah 1:14,
&c.; there never was such a day before. It will be a day of
trouble
to those that are the posterity of Jacob, both good and bad; they shall
not be delivered from it, but they shall be delivered out of it"
(Mathew Poole). Locusts, loss of material wealth: Babylon, Rome, London,
New York:
This could be applied to any Jacob in trouble whose first thought is
how do I get out. Let us say supplanting was Jacob's trouble, from which
he was not released until 21 years of servitude with Laban, wrestling
the angel for a new name. Virtue does not lie solely in the name.
Some named Israel might as well have the name of Jacob. Old name. The
new name supposes a new heart.
Jacob is Jacob, elder or younger,
Israel or Dutchman. Do attributes of a person attach from the name?
Names are at least memorials. This does not justify saying that Jacob is a symbol of Jacob or Israel
of Pennsylvania and that since Jacob's trouble started when the desire
of all nations would come, Israel and Judah brought out of captivity
and restored to the land given to their forefathers to possess suggests
that the Pennsylvania Germans are going to repatriate themselves into
their former beliefs, although were it so, those beliefs would be like
Isaac digging again the wells of water of Abraham (Gen 26.18).
Our Jacob dates from 1717. The factual Jacob the Elder is not Jacob the Patriarch whose name was changed to Israel, father of the twelve tribes. Come with me now to yesteryear, the 1720s and 30s in Philadelphia
colonies, before the American revolt, Take it as another planet time and
space, yet like our own. Human society is miracle enough we hardly
know. The passions are rougher, less controlled. In means of traditional
communication, horseback and letter, language, we imagine ourselves
superior. They spoke German. A golden age? Here the themes of
Penn began. It is a golden age of peace, the main concern, with justice.
It had naivete too, beliefs later ages would
dismiss. Roll it up 300 years later and it is a golden age compared to
this.
