SYNOPSIS: During the night he sends his wives and children ahead, and tarries behind on his own. Then "a man" comes and fights with Jacob all night, and dislocates his hip. Jacob knows he is an angel and demands to be blessed; in response, the angel changes Jacob's name to Israel because he has striven with gods (yisra El). Jacob/Israel then asks: "What's your name?" but his adversary evades the question. The story ends with a pun about the name of the place, Peniel or Penuel ('face of God'), and an explanation about Jewish dietary laws.
- Text of the passage in Nawat
Note that unlike the various dream scenes in which Jacob and others are depicted here and there in Genesis, this one is not called a dream. Jacob gets up in the middle of the night, and first of all sends his family ahead to cross the river (náhal, elsewhere 'stream'), while he himself stays behind alone (v. 25) wayye'aveq ish ‛immo ‛ad ‛alot hassháxar 'and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.'
Now in several other places Genesis speaks of "a man" (ish) only to reveal afterwards that he is actually an angel, or rather God's messenger (mal'akh YHWH, mal'akh [ha]elohim). Other times, the ish is later referred to even more surprisingly as God himself, as in the story of Abraham and the warning about Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus as we read Genesis we come to be suspicious when reading in a scene that "a man" pops up out of nowhere and interacts with the protagonist; we develop "angel-dar." Here, Jacob is alone at night when, out of nowhere, "a man wrestled with him." But in this scene the text never actually tells us explicitly that he was an angel.
Whatever he was, the anecdote has some clearly supernatural overtones to it, and we are given enough clues to figure out that he wasn't just a man. But because it is never indicated outright who or what this ish was, some commentators have suggested that perhaps the original story was about some other kind of divine or supernatural being, whether we want to call it an imp, sprite, demon or something else. So notice how the scene goes: they wrestle until dawn, and then the ish, seeing that he can't win the fight (!), gets his revenge by deliberately injuring him. Then he asks Jacob to let him go (!!) because the sun is rising (!!!), and Jacob's reply is just as startling: "I will not let you go (!!!!) unless you bless me (!!!!!)."
It doesn't get any less weird after that, though I will desist from adding more exclamation marks: wayyómer elaw ma sh'mékha wayyómer ya‛aqov 'He said to him: What is your name? And he answered: Jacob.' This, as far as I know, is the only instance of an angel asking a human their name. Next, however, the ish does something which is consistent with what angels do (in Genesis): he changes Jacob's name: lo ya‛aqov ye'amer ‛od shimkha ki im yisra'el 'Your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel.' This is accompanied by the etymology de rigueur: ki saríta ‛im elohim w'‛im anashim wattukhal 'because you fought with God (or gods?) and with men, and prevailed.' At first this looks like it is providing a clue as to the identity of Jacob's interlocutor, but it turns out to be inconclusive because you can use what the "angel" says to support any thesis you like: Jacob has fought successfully with both gods and men... so which is this?!
Next Jacob (now Israel) goes on to ask the ish what his name is. The spirit gets out of answering that question by replying with another: "Why are you asking me my name?"... wayvárekh oto sham 'and he blessed him there.' As I read this it sounds to me as if the concession of the blessing is consequent on Jacob's question about his name. So we have this sequence of events: (i) Jacob asks the ish to bless him, (ii) the ish asks Jacob his name (maybe he needs the name for the blessing?), (iii) Jacob tells him, (iv) the ish gives Jacob a new name, (v) now Jacob asks the ish what his name is, (vi) the ish sidesteps the question and blesses Jacob. I would imagine that the mysterious character cannot bless Jacob unless he knows his name, but the odd part is that if he were God's messenger he must have known whom he had been sent to, and surely his name too; either the question has some other function (rhetorical?), or this is no normal angel (just as normal angels do not need to leave at dawn, and they don't need to be allowed to leave either, they just go when they feel like it). But anyway... if this ish is not your garden-variety angel but some kind of night-sprite, then it is plausible that knowing someone's name is a form of power that it can hold over people, and perhaps, in that case, humans can also wield power over them if they know their name. The reason why I say this is plausible is that I believe very similar beliefs may be found in the supernatural lore of many folk ("pagan") cultures, so that it would be typologically plausible if nothing else. If so, this would provide the clever (and tricky, remember) Jacob, who by now realises what kind of a being he is dealing with if he didn't know before, with a reason for asking him his name (and notice that angels in Genesis do not have names!); it would also explain not only why the ish refrains from answering the question (or rather, he "answers" without telling him his name), but also perhaps why at this particular point in the story he gives Jacob the blessing he has asked for, if the ish felt pressured into it by Jacob's gambit of trying to get the ish to reveal his name.
Speiser thinks that (v. 30) wayvárekh oto sham does not really mean that the ish literally blessed Jacob but rather that he simply said goodbye and left (interpreting b-r-k to mean 'to take one's leave'), but while that would also fit the story as I am (re)constructing it - Jacob asked the sprite its name, whereupon the sprite vanished - I think that in the context of Jacob having said to the ish a few moments before (v. 27) lo ashallexakha ki im berakhtáni 'I won't let you go unless you bless me' (where b-r-k certainly can't mean 'to take leave'), it is begging the question to propose that wayvárekh oto doesn't mean that he blessed him.
Leaving aside now the frivolous aspects of what this passage is about and coming to its actual meaning (literary and otherwise), we may be caught here between two pitfalls to be avoided: that of taking the episode too seriously and of not taking it seriously enough. A further danger is that of being too dogmatic in our opinion, so I shall begin by quoting Speiser's sobring advice, which might well be applied to the whole enterprise of reading Genesis without reading into Genesis (EAS p. 256): "The reader, of course, should not try to spell out details that the author himself glimpsed as if through a haze." That said, let me also quote Speiser's suggestion about what the episode might mean (p. 257):
One may conclude, accordingly, that the encounter at Penuel was understood as a test of Jacob's fitness for the larger tasks that lay ahead. The results were encouraging. Though he was left alone to wrestle through the night with a mysterious assailant, Jacob did not falter. The effort left its mark - a permanent injury to remind Jacob of what had taken place, and to serve perhaps as a portent of things to come.
32:25 wayye'aveq
The verb '-b-q 'to wrestle' may have been part of a name game related to the stream near which Jacob was encamped and which he had sent his family to cross, called yabboq.
32:29 yisra'el
The suggested etymology of the name Israel is no less preposterous than most of those peppered all over Genesis. And as with the vast majority of those names, the real historical and scientific origin is unknown and stands a good chance of forever remaining so. Naturally, theories abound. One which is referenced in CB is, even if not probable, at least sufficiently fascinating to merit my attention: it is the suggestion that yisra'el (the spelling is with sin, שׂ, which is identical in form to shin, שׁ, in consonantal spelling) is a "corruption" of ish raxel 'man of Rachel'. According to the biblical genealogy, Rachel was the mother of Joseph. The insinuation is that the "real" Israelites (b'ne yisra'el, sons of "Israel") are the offspring of Rachel, Jacob's most loved and favoured wife. The change of Jacob's name to Israel might also be interpreted as meaning that Jacob because the man (husband) of Rachel, a notion with strong matriarchal overtones. Linguistically, I am sad to say that this is all rather forced. Granted, most of the etymologies that appear in Genesis are also forced, but nobody is saying they are true, and this one doesn't even figure among those that Genesis saw fit to preserve.
32:31 p'ni'el
Jacob names the place (again?) and calls it Peniel (or Penuel, in v. 32) which is explained as meaning 'face of God', and Jacob says ki ra'íti elohim panim el panim wattinnatzel nafshi 'for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved' (KJV), meaning that he has survived an encounter with God. Now that could be interpreted as "evidence" that the ish was God (or in other words, that he was an angel, since in other Genesis passages an angel first presented as a man is later described as God), or at least, that the editor who penned these words was convinced (or wanted to be convinced) that the mysterious ish, who has now departed the scene, had been an angel. But there are lots of ways in which that might not be what this means, too. The JPS translation provides one escape route, by translating elohim not as 'God' in this instance but as 'divine being.' But if we accept the hypothesis of mutiple sources, this statement might indeed mean 'God', only not be referring to the scene with the ish but to previous events. Again, turning the whole thing around, perhaps this brief notice came from a place or sanctuary called Peniel (or Penuel) with a local tradition about its origin and its deity. Indeed, maybe the whole episode formed part of that local tradition (as suggested in CB, from whence I have taken some of the other ideas mentioned above).
32:32 w'hu tzoléa‛ ‛al y'rekho
Jacob is now described as having acquired a limp which is attributed to the injury he received from his supernatural visitor.
32:33
This verse uses the same story of the injury to Jacob's thigh to explain a dietary law forbidding the eating of the sciatic muscle. This is the only place in the Bible where such a law as this is mentioned. It is curious that just four verses after the introduction of the name yisra'el, in the name's second ocurrence ever, it already appears in the collocation b'ne yisra'el 'children of Israel' referring to the Israelite people which did not yet exist as such, obviously, at the time of the narrative. This is justified on account of the etiological function of this verse.
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