I have a hunch that Jacob's ladder In Genesis 28:12 really should be translated as “tree”. The Hebrew term is “cullam” and only appears this one time in all of scripture, but it comes from the root word “calal” which means to lift up or exalt – once again not really very helpful, but the very reason the term has ever been translated as ladder. Within Jewish tradition, the Kabbalah associates Jacob's ladder with the sephiroth tree, so there is some existing president to interpreting this term “cullam” as “tree”.
Why is this reliant – it would continue the imagery of “The tree of Life” from Genesis 2 through scripture which would ultimately be fulfilled in the person of Christ - Isiah 11:1,2. It also would give us some idea what Jacob was doing when he was erecting the stone he used as a pillow into a pillar to commemorate the event. The term for pillar used in this passage is “matstsebah”, which can also be translated as “the stump of tree”. We know that the Greek temples reflected a kind of Eden, with the stone colonnades representing trees, and the center of the temple reserved for worshiping their deities being a kind of center of the garden as in Genesis where the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life resided. Tree worship was also pervasive in the land of Sumeria where Abraham came from, so the pillars Jacob was erecting would have been a symbol of the tree he saw in his vision.
Any thought on the subject, or does anyone know of any other refferences that suggest that Jacob's ladder as a tree?