Notes 42: Appeasement (32:4-22)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob sends a message to Esau in Seir to say: I'm back. The messenger comes back with one saying: "Your message has been seen. He's coming. With 400 men." That last bit makes Jacob slightly nervous, so he splits his camp into two halves to cut his losses if worst comes to worst. Then he prays. Finally, he organises a parade of goats, sheep, camels, cows, bulls and donkeys, which he orders his servants to lead in blocks with gaps between each group, and if Esau asks what's going on as they're filing past him they are to answer that Jacob is just behind them. And that it is a present. This was meant to put Esau in a better mood by the time Jacob, coming up in the rear, finally reached Esau.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

Source critics suggest that what we have here was originally two accounts of Jacob's preparations to meet Esau, which would have come from different original sources and later been combined. Each of these accounts describes a different stratagem adopted by Jacob: in the first he splits his camp into two halves, in the second he sends his belongings ahead of him to appease his brother with gifts before they come face to face. Each of these two accounts ends with Jacob spending the night in the camp, so we seem to have him going to bed twice: (v. 14) wayyálen sham balláyla hahu 'he slept there that night', (v. 22) w'hu lan balláyla hahu bammaxane 'and he slept in the camp that night.'

In addition to these two strategies, Jacob also deals with his predicament in a third way: with a prayer (vv. 10-13).

We have already had one story explaining the origin of the name maxanáyim, but now we find another one: Jacob split his people into two camps.


32:7 w'gam holekh liqrat'kha w'arba‛ me'ot ish ‛immo
The fact that the messenger reports Esau to be coming to meet Jacob need not imply anything sinister; he might just as well be coming to greet him hospitably. On the other hand, we may well wonder (as Jacob perhaps did) whether Esau is bringing "four hundred men" along with him just to say hello?