Not a Title but an Act

In English the word “redeemer” is a noun. It names a role, the way “judge” or “shepherd” names a role, and a role can be held by someone who has not yet done anything in it. If you read Genesis 48:16 in a translation that says “the angel who has been my redeemer,” you might picture Jacob giving God a title of honor.

The Hebrew does not work that way, as the form of the word Jacob chose and the one small word that follows it both show.

Three Letters and Their Vowels

Most Hebrew words grow out of a root of three consonants. The root carries the frame of a meaning, and the vowels laid over it, with any letters added at the front or back, make an actual word. The root of our word is g-’-l (gimel, alef, lamed), “to redeem, to buy back.” With one set of vowels it reads gaal גָּאַל gaw-al', “he redeemed.” With another it reads goel, “one redeeming.” The consonants are the same; the vowels alone make the difference.

The form goel is what grammars call a participle. A Hebrew participle has no tense of its own. It points to someone in the act of doing something, an action going on or continuing, and it can stand in a sentence the way a noun does. Put the article ha, “the,” in front of it, and you have ha-goel הַגֹּאֵל gaw-al', “the one redeeming.”

Here is the verse again.

Genesis 48:16 the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be called in them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth."

Straight after ha-goel comes oti, “me.” The participle takes a direct object, exactly as a verb does. That settles what kind of word it is in this sentence. Jacob is not naming an office. He is saying “the One who redeems me,” and then he adds where from: mikkol ra, “from all evil.”

Think of a man at the beach who points to a young woman in a tall chair and says, “She is the lifeguard.” That is a title. It would be true even on a day when nobody went into the water. Now think of a man who has just been dragged out of the surf, still coughing, who points to her and says, “She is the one who pulled me out.” He is not describing a job. He is telling you what happened to him. Jacob’s words are the second kind.

The YLV renders it “who has redeemed me,” and that fits the setting, because Jacob is looking back. He speaks at the end of his life, about evils he had already been brought through, and the One who had been redeeming him through all of them is the One he names. The participle shows the One at work; the object “me” shows whom the work was done for. This is not a general statement about God. It is something that happened to Jacob himself.

Redemption, where it first appears in Scripture, is not a title God carries about with Him. It is something He actually did for a man, and the man could say so.

The Messenger

The other noun in the phrase is ha-malakh, “the messenger.” Malakh is the ordinary Hebrew word for one who is sent, and it can mean a messenger from God or simply a man carrying a message. Here it has the article, “the messenger,” and verse 16 itself contains neither the name the LORD nor the word Elohim. The messenger is not being introduced as someone new. He is named as one already in view, the third in a line that begins in the verse before.

The form of the word is plain as well. Malakh here is not bound to the word after it, as it would be in a phrase like “the messenger of someone.” The words “who redeems me” do not tell us whose messenger this is. They tell us more about the same person: the messenger is the one who redeems.

Three Names and One Verb

Jacob’s blessing runs from verse 15 through verse 16 as one sentence. It has three subjects standing side by side, and then a single verb.

The verb is yevarekh, “may he bless.” Hebrew marks the person, gender, and number of a verb’s subject on the verb itself. The letter at the front of yevarekh marks “he,” and the end of the word carries no plural ending. It is singular. Three are named, and one “he” is asked to bless.

You can see the difference in another blessing, given to Rebekah when she left her family.

Genesis 24:60 And they blessed Rebekah, and said to her, "Our sister, become thousands of ten thousands, and let your seed possess the gate of those who hate them."

Here the verb is plural: “they blessed Rebekah.” It comes from the same root, and here it ends with the letter waw, which marks the plural. Her family blessed her together, and the verb says so. In Genesis 48:16 that ending is absent. Jacob calls on the God of his fathers, the God who shepherded him, and the messenger who redeemed him, and he asks that “he” bless the boys.

The Other Side, Stated Fairly

A careful reader should hear the objection, because it is a real one. In Hebrew, when several subjects are listed, the verb often agrees with the one nearest to it. Since “the messenger” stands closest to yevarekh, someone could argue that the singular verb belongs to the messenger alone and says nothing about the two names before it. Taken by itself, the grammar of this one verse would not close the question.

But the matter does not rest on the verb alone. It rests on what Genesis has already said about this messenger before Jacob ever lay on his deathbed, and when those passages are read, the singular verb is no longer a puzzle to be explained away. It fits what the messenger had already said of Himself.

What the Verse Shows

The first man in Scripture to speak the word redemption is Jacob. The one he called redeemer is the messenger. That messenger stands in one sentence with Elohim and takes the same singular verb. And the word for what He did is a participle with an object, “the One who redeems me.”

When redemption first stands in Scripture, then, it is not yet a statute or a doctrine. It is one man’s confession about his whole life.

Jacob does not stop with this one name. In the next chapter of Genesis, as he blesses his sons, he speaks of the One beyond himself two more times, and each time he uses a different word.