Jacob is exactly the kind of morally ambiguous smart-aleck that audiences love to cheer for. He’s a fast thinker who knows when his brother will be most susceptible to aromas from the kitchen (Genesis 25). He’s a shrewd impersonator who hoodwinks his aging father just as the estate is being settled (Genesis 27). And he hatches a get-rich-quick scheme that wasn’t a lie, per se, but also wasn’t a forthright explanation of what exactly he was doing out in those fields with his father-in-law’s cattle (Genesis 30). It’s not for nothing that Jacob is sometimes nicknamed the “trickster.”
But my favorite story in the Jacob cycle (and my favorite story in scripture) is the moment when Jacob comes clean—when all the scheming comes to an end and Jacob confronts the one person he can’t trick or hoodwink or dodge or outwit. In Genesis 32, Jacob comes face to face with God when he least expects it.
At this point in the story, we readers are hardly expecting to find God either; when the chapter opens, we’re preparing for a very different confrontation. We find Jacob on the borders of his brother’s territory, about to see Esau for the first time in over a decade. And he’s clearly worried that the intervening years have done little to cool Esau’s rage (see Genesis 27:42). Most of the chapter is occupied with precautions and bribes and carefully worded messages—a whole pageantry of conciliation. Jacob’s opening bid is a letter about how much has changed and how much might now be water under the bridge (Genesis 32:4–5)—only to learn, in return, that Esau is coming to meet him with what looks like an army: four hundred men who will arrive the next day (Genesis 32:6). And so Jacob starts planning for contingencies. He divides his family into two groups, ensuring that even if Esau’s army kills one, at least the other will have time to flee (Genesis 32:7–8). His prayers start to take on an edge of desperation as he begs God for deliverance (Genesis 32:9–12). And he makes a series of “presents” for Esau—an absurd number of cattle delivered in successive stages (Genesis 32:13–20), each designed to ease tensions and soften hearts before the final face-to-face reunion.
Jacob, you see, is trying to do what he has always done: to game the situation, to use his wits to come out on top. Although his desire for reconciliation is genuine, his methods still tend toward the theatrical. He composes and arranges, packages and stages, gives and flatters and then, finally, the whole day spent in planning and pageantry, Jacob sends his family across a nearby river for safety and lies down to rest.
Hoping, surely, for a good night’s sleep, he gets the opposite. Jacob is jumped by “a man” who starts “wrestl[ing] with him” (Genesis 32:24, NRSV). Lone sleepers in the desert naturally attract bandits, but Jacob soon learns that this is no ordinary thug. This “man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Genesis 32:24, NRSV). When Jacob puts up a fight, the stranger sticks around. For hours. Instead of eight hours of shut-eye, Jacob gets eight hours in the ring. Anticipating that his soonest strenuous activity would be wrangling with his estranged brother in broad daylight, Jacob finds himself sizing up a complete stranger in total darkness instead.
But make no mistake—this was no dream, nor metaphor, nor even a spiritually symbolic visionary encounter. The text tells us that it was emphatically physical. Physical enough, at least, that when Jacob puts up a prize-winning fight and day starts to dawn and the stranger wants to break away, he has to blow Jacob’s thigh out of joint to do it (Genesis 32:25). For all the ambiguity around this story and the identity of the wrestler, we can at least say this much: spiritual metaphors don’t leave you limping.
Injury notwithstanding, Jacob holds enough ground to demand a blessing from this stranger. “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me,” he says (Genesis 32:26, KJV). “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob,” the stranger replies, “but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Genesis 32:28).
It’s at this point that the story’s ambiguities really start to spiral out of control. For instance: who won? Jacob certainly managed to prevent the stranger from escaping (Genesis 32:25–26), but the text goes on to show that the stranger isn’t actually as cowed as he seems; Jacob cannot force him to reveal his name (Genesis 32:29). Speaking of names, how should we understand Jacob’s new title? “Israel” can be translated “let God prevail.” But another translation—the one the stranger points to in verse 28—is “he who prevails with God.” So who, exactly, has done the “prevailing” here? Did God prevail with Jacob, or did Jacob prevail with God? And, while we’re at it, who was this mysterious wrestler, in the end? Tradition likes to assign the role to an angel, but Jacob insists that he’s seen God in this event: “Jacob called the name of the place Peniel [or: ‘face of God’], for I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30). Did Jacob wrestle with a man? An angel? God himself?
Personally, I like that the passage backs off here, refusing to give us answers. It’s wonderfully rich, this private moment when Jacob is embraced through the veil, sees the face of God, receives a new name, and leaves from the encounter a fundamentally different person. It’s appropriate, I think, that so much of the scene remains shrouded in mystery.
But as the story emerges out of its nighttime ambiguity, I am just as taken by its ordinary, mundane, breathlessly beautiful final moment.
“As [Jacob] passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh” (Genesis 32:31). Jacob limps into the dawn of his reconciliation with Esau. When he faces his brother he will do so not as the mighty tribe-leader he had projected, but as a cripple. And yet, precisely because of his wrestle, he will have a deeper source of confidence than he could have won for himself with all of his quick thinking and smooth talking. Jacob no longer has to fear Esau, because he’s prevailed with God. He doesn’t have to keep up the theatrics, because he’s had an encounter with something that really matters, that outstrips the pageantry of this world. He may bear the marks of that encounter for the rest of his life, but because he can confront his brother in weakness—and with a God-given confidence in that weakness—he is far more ready for the reconciliation to come than he had been eight hours before.
We have all had our shares of nighttime wrestles. God has a way of meeting us there, alone and sad on kitchen linoleum, or hiding despondently under bedcovers, or pacing back and forth on quiet city streets under streetlamps and stars—nighttime struggles that threaten to break you, where you are so evenly matched that you must strain to the very edge of your capacity. Wrestling with God: I know of no better analogy for what my hardest moments have been like. I also know of no better analogy for the tenacity that calls down heaven’s greatest blessings.
God did not give Jacob confidence in the shape of a triumphant win, a clear victory in the middle of the night to boost his ego. God gave Jacob a limp and sent him hobbling off to face his brother in uncoverable weakness, bearing the new wisdom that, in God and his grace, there is nothing to fear, and that weakness is not something to be covered or gamed. Jacob was prevented from meeting his brother in the strength he had hoped to project. Esau will meet a version of Jacob that is older and feebler, less dazzlingly witty, certainly less rested. There will be bags under his eyes and a hobble to his step. But maybe, too, there will be a strange expression, dazed and far-off, but also—for the first time?—unguarded.
Jacob’s story gives us no promise that our encounters with God will be safe, or tame, or tidy. You might well walk away with a limp. You might hobble for the rest of your life. But the promise of Jacob’s story is that you can know even these marks as a grace, because God reached down and swept your stories aside and brought you right up to the brink of what really mattered. A wrestle? To be sure: you strained and sweat and hated every second of it. But like Jacob, if you managed to keep your eyes open, in it you saw the face of God. More importantly: it left you ready to finally see the face of your brother.
Kimberly Matheson is the Laura F. Willes Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research centers on Book of Mormon theology, Christian contemplative practice, and the continental philosophy of religion. Kimberly holds a PhD in theology from Loyola University Chicago, an MTS in philosophy of religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in ancient near east studies from Brigham Young University. She is the author of Helaman: A Brief Theological Introduction (Maxwell, 2020) and sits on the boards of the Book of Mormon Studies Association and the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar.
Art by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).
The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.
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This is also one of my favorite stories. Thanks for the discussion!