Genesis
32:22-31
August
2, 2026
The
same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven
children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.
He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything
that he had.
Jacob
was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw
that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and
Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.
Then he
said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I
will not let you go, unless you bless me."
So he
said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."
Then
the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you
have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed."
Then
Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why
is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him.
So
Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face,
yet my life is preserved." The sun
rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
*************************************************
This Bible passage can send you down
a few rabbit holes.
I don’t know whether you caught it,
but in the last two verses it refers to the place where Jacob wrestled, one
time as Peniel and one time as Penuel. I
thought this might have been a typo but I looked it up and found a commentator
who wrote,
“This
question is an excellent example of how a question that looks very simple at
first really is not simple at all. There are a few complications involved in
answering this question. (Make that a lot of complications!)”[1]
He then
went on at great length about each variant and where the place goes by each
name in other parts of the Bible, and how a vowel could easily be mistaken –
but not these vowels, and not so close together. After paragraphs and
paragraphs he finally concludes,
“The
lesson to be learned from Jacob’s encounter with the Lord is the same
whether the place is called Peniel or Penuel or both.”
So it’s a
case of potato/potahto, tomato/tomahto.
The bigger problem is figuring out what was going on at the place, and
that is even more confused.
To give the setting, many years have
passed since Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching to heaven. He spent, all told, twenty years working for
his uncle Laban, and by the time they went their separate ways Jacob had two
wives, two concubines, eleven children, considerable flocks of goats and sheep,
and even some oxen. There were so many
that he was able to send a whole bunch ahead of him across the river Jabbok as
bribes to assuage the anger of his brother Esau, whom he had learned was in the
area and headed in Jacob’s direction with four hundred armed men and a history
of grievances. In fact, he sent everyone
ahead: wives, children, slaves, and livestock.
Was it clever strategy or was it
cowardice? Was he using them as a shield
or was he protecting them from pursuers? He was afraid for himself, but he was
also afraid for his family. He remembered God’s promises to his
grandparents and his parents and to him and to his offspring, but he also felt
he had to remind God of them. He prayed
before he sent people on ahead.
“Deliver
me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid
of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you
good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted
because of their number.’” [Genesis 32:11-12]
Everything
was blurring together.
The way the story is told in Genesis
reflect that. Beyond the Peniel/Penuel bit, it isn’t exactly clear who Jacob
ended up wrestling with that night, or why.
That part of the story begins abruptly:
“Jacob
was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” [Genesis 32:24]
Then
there’s this weird part about Jacob not wanting to let go until the man blessed
him (which seems like an odd request of a stranger). And he must have been a stranger, or Jacob
wouldn’t have had to demand his name.
Then the man refused to give his name, but demanded that he be let go
because the sun was coming up (almost like was a ghost or something; you’ll often
hear about Jacob wrestling with an angel, even though the Bible never says that). Whoever he was, he agrees to bless Jacob, but
Jacob has to give his own name. And then
this other wrestler blesses him by changing Jacob’s name (which is an odd power
to have) and calls him Israel (the one who strives with God), saying,
“You
shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and
with humans, and have prevailed.” [Genesis 32:28]
Presumably
he then disappears, but again the Bible doesn’t say that, and Jacob changes the
name of the place to either Peniel or Penuel to indicate that it was God
himself with whom he wrestled. He said,
“I
have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” [Genesis 32:30]
It all seems like a long dream
sequence, and Jacob – or Israel – was known for dreaming about angels when he
was younger. Except this time his hip
has been thrown out of its socket, which isn’t just a symptom of a confused
dream. He will walk with a limp for the
rest of his life.
Try to make sense out of all of
that. I’ll give you my own take, but
with the understanding that there are going to be other ways of seeing things
that are less convoluted and more precise and some that may be more complicated
and blurry, and that there’s something worth hearing in all of them.
Jacob’s deepest purpose turns out to
be to set the pattern for his promised offspring who would become a people
known by his new name, and who would discover that their individual and
collective relationship to humanity and to God are so tightly intertwined that it
is impossible to separate and compartmentalize them. The proper worship of God is tied to the
proper respect and dignity we show God’s children.
The faith that would grow from the
troubled lives of Abraham and his family, would be the one that insists that
God’s favor isn’t to be earned by assent to intellectual understanding or
theological formulations, much less bought with ritual or with magical
incantations and sacrifice. The prophet
Micah, for example, wrestled with what that would mean:
“With
what shall I come before the Lord,
and
bow myself before God on high?
Shall I
come before him with burnt offerings,
with
calves a year old?
Will
the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with
ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I
give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has
told you, O mortal, what is good;
and
what does the Lord require of you
but
to do justice, to love kindness,
and
to walk humbly with your God?” [Micah 6:6-8]
Limping
Jacob, now Israel, would cross the river in the morning, and, after years of
avoiding him, reconcile with his brother who, as it turned out, had forgiven
him already.
As
Christians, who follow one who was God in the flesh, our own purpose is to love
and engage seriously with him through engaging with one another.
“Beloved,
since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one
another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” [I John 4:11-12]
Try
wrestling with that, not in the abstract, but in what it means in the most
difficult parts of your life. There may
be a change in how you view yourself or how others identify you, and it may
hurt. But on the other side of it lies a
blessing, even a victory,
“For
you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” [Genesis 32:28]
No comments:
Post a Comment