As the Dust of the Land

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth. You shall spread out to the west, to the east, to the north, and to the south. All the families on earth will be blessed through you and your descendants.                        Genesis 28:14

                Thus God promised Jacob as he dreamt of the ladder whose head reached heaven.

Some commentators see the promise of descendants “like the dust of the earth” simply as a variant of the earlier promise to Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham:

I will bless you greatly, and increase your offspring like the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring shall inherit their enemies' gate.  Genesis 22:17

                Clearly, in both instances, the blessing is one of quantity. (In an earlier Dvar Torah, I suggested the possibility that the blessing “like the stars of the sky” is one of quality.)

                The blessing “like the dust of the earth” was also given to Abraham:

I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; if a man will be able to count [all] the grains of dust in the world, then your offspring also will be countable.                                                                         Genesis 13:16

                It is noteworthy that when the blessing was given to grandfather and to grandson, each specifically followed the blessing of the Land [13:15; 28:13].

                Perhaps there is a qualitative aspect to the blessing in addition to its quantitative nature. At least on the level of Drash, we can translate “like the dust of the Land,” comparing Avraham and Jacob’s descendants to the dust of the Holy Land itself. Just as the soil of the Land is inherently holy, so too, the Children of Israel possess an innate level of sanctity.