A Man Wrestled With Him

Jacob left Haran a rich man, with two wives, two maidservants, eleven children, and great flocks. But the road home ran toward his brother. Twenty years earlier Esau had said in his heart that he would kill him (Genesis 27:41), and now the messengers Jacob sent ahead came back with news: “he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men (ish אִישׁ eesh) with him” (Genesis 32:7). The text says plainly how Jacob took it: “Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed” (Genesis 32:8).

He divided his people and animals into two camps, so that if one was struck the other might escape; he sent droves of animals ahead as a present, hoping to soften Esau before they met; and he prayed. His prayer shows what he was asking for on the night that followed.

Genesis 32:11-12 I am too small for all the mercies and for all the truth which you have done with your servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and strike me, the mother upon the sons.

“Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother.” The word deliver comes back at the end of the night.

Then Jacob rose in the dark, took his wives and children across the ford of the Jabbok, and sent everything he had over after them. He stayed behind.

Left Alone

Genesis 32:25-26 And Jacob was left alone; and a man (ish) wrestled with him ad עַד ad(עד) the going up of the dawn. And when he saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was strained as he wrestled with him.

The text begins with the words “Jacob was left alone.” Everything Jacob owned and everyone he loved was on the other side of the stream. There was no one to help him and no one to see.

The narrator chooses his word with care. He does not say a messenger came, or that God appeared. He says a man, ish, the ordinary Hebrew word for a man. That is how the opponent stood before Jacob: in the form of a man. Whatever Jacob would later understand about Him, on that night the one who took hold of him came as a man.

Wrestling Takes Two Bodies

Wrestling is not something that can happen at a distance. You cannot wrestle with a voice, or with a light, or with a figure in a dream. It does not exist unless two bodies take hold of each other. And this wrestling lasted the whole night, from the time Jacob was left alone until “the going up of the dawn,” when the sky began to grow light.

Set this beside the other times God met Jacob. At Bethel it was a dream (Genesis 28:12). In Haran it was a dream (Genesis 31:10–11). Much later, on his way down to Egypt, it was “the visions of the night” (Genesis 46:2). Those meetings were real, and in them Jacob heard God speak. But at the Jabbok there is no mention of a dream or a vision. Jacob was awake, and the One who met him met him with a body.

The Touch

Verse 26 tells how the night turned. The text does not say that the opponent struck Jacob. It says that He touched him. The word is the plain word for a touch, and the place was the hollow of the thigh, where the leg meets the body. With that touch, the joint was strained, and it stayed that way. A few verses later the text records that as the sun rose Jacob “was limping upon his thigh” (Genesis 32:32), and it adds that the sons of Israel do not eat “the sinew of the thigh-vein which is upon the hollow of the thigh, until this day,” because of what was done to Jacob there (Genesis 32:33).

So the night left a mark, and the mark was in Jacob’s body. That is what sets this meeting apart. It was not a vision and not a dream, but an event that left a result in a body, and the result was still there the next morning.

Holding On

Even after the touch, Jacob did not let go.

Genesis 32:27 And he said, "Let me go, for the dawn has gone up." And he said, "I will not let you go, except you bless me."

The one who asks to be let go is not Jacob, worn out and injured, but the opponent: “Let me go, for the dawn has gone up.” Jacob, with his hip strained, answers in a sentence that joins holding on and asking together, “I will not let you go, except you bless me.” What the text records is that Jacob held on to the One who had wrestled with him and asked Him for a blessing.

What followed is familiar from Book 4. The man asked Jacob his name, and gave him a new one: “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men (ish), and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29). When Jacob asked the man’s name in return, he was not told it. Instead, “he blessed him there” (Genesis 32:30).

Who Was the Man?

A question rises out of the account. The narrator calls the opponent a man. Yet this man changes Jacob’s name, the way God had changed Abram’s name to Abraham (Genesis 17:5). He refuses to give His own name. And He blesses Jacob, the very thing Jacob had asked Him for.

The narrator does not answer the question in so many words. He leaves the answer to Jacob, who gave the place a name before he left it, and to the prophet Hosea, who looked back on that night many centuries later. Both of them say who the man was.

Jacob was alone, he was afraid, a man took hold of him, and through the night his body and that man’s body strove together until a touch strained his thigh. When the sun came up, Jacob said what had met him, and Hosea said it again long after.