As with most of the other Negro spirituals, it is not possible to ascertain where and when this one was first sung. In his book Negro Slave Songs in the United States, 1953, Miles Mark Fisher tells us that this “Jacob’s ladder” theme was heard in the spirituals as early as 1825. Based on the dream of Jacob as recorded in Genesis 28:10-17, it has the one-idea repetition that was so characteristic of the camp meeting songs of the early 1800s. The final line of each stanza is an echo of 2 Timothy 2:3: “A good soldier of Jesus Christ.”

In the 1860s, while the slaves of Cherokee County, Alabama were singing, “I am climbing up Jacob’s ladder; Don’t you grieve after me,” there came from Durham, North Carolina, another concept, “Climb up Jacob’s ladder, higher and higher, ‘Way in the kingdom.”

Ellen White, in her book The Desire of Ages, makes this application of the imagery: “Christ is the ladder that Jacob saw, the base resting on the earth, and the topmost round reaching to the gate of heaven, to the very threshold of glory. If that ladder had failed by a single step of reaching the earth, we should have been lost. But Christ reaches us where we are. He took our nature and overcame, that we through taking His nature might overcome. Made ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom. 8:3), He lived a sinless life. Now by His divinity He lays hold upon the throne of heaven, while by His humanity He reaches us. He bids us by faith in Him attain to the glory of the character of God. Therefore are we to be perfect, even as our ‘Father which is in heaven is perfect'” (pp. 311, 312).

Where the congregation is able, it might be appropriate to sing the first three stanzas a cappella in four-part, improvised harmony, starting in the key of B and progressing upward one-half step with each stanza. Then on the last stanza, all could sing the melody in unison, while the accompaniment plays the harmonization by Melvin West (1930- ; see Biographies).

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.