Face to Face

When the sun came up over the Jabbok, Jacob did two things before he moved on. He gave the place a name, and he said why. The narrator had called the opponent a man. Jacob calls Him something else.

Genesis 32:31 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel; "for I have seen God face to face, and my soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) was delivered."

Peniel

The name Peniel joins two Hebrew words, panim, “face,” and El, “God.” It means “the face of God,” and Jacob explains the name in his own words; “face to face” in Hebrew is panim el panim.

The word panim, “face,” is always plural in form. The Hebrew Bible never writes it in the singular, so the plural form does not mean that there were many faces; it is simply how the language says “face.” And the word Elohim, “God,” is also plural in form, yet here it is the object of Jacob’s seeing and points to the one being he saw. Jacob is not describing a crowd. He saw One, and he says that the One he saw face to face was God.

So the man of verse 25 is, in Jacob’s own words, God. The narrator described what Jacob met as it appeared. Jacob named whom he had met.

My Soul Was Delivered

The YLV keeps the Hebrew word nephesh, the life or soul of a person, so what was delivered is Jacob’s very life. The verb is the same Hebrew verb that stood in his prayer the evening before: “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother” (Genesis 32:12). Jacob had asked to be delivered, and in the morning he declares his life delivered, on the very night in which he saw God face to face.

That is remarkable, because Scripture states plainly what seeing God means for a man. The LORD Himself would later say to Moses, “man (adam אָדָם aw-dawm') shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). When Manoah realized whom he and his wife had seen, he said, “We shall surely die, because we have seen God” (Judges 13:22). Against that background, Jacob’s sentence is extraordinary. He saw God face to face, and his life was delivered.

The statement holds both together: he saw, and he lived. A way stands open in which facing God does not end in death for a man. What that way is, Jacob would name at the end of his life: he called the One he met that night the goel.

Hosea Looks Back

Many centuries later, the prophet Hosea looked back on the same night. (Here too the YLV uses the Hebrew verse numbers; in most English Bibles these lines are Hosea 12:3-4.)

Hosea 12:4-5 In the womb he grasped his brother's heel, and in his vigor he strove with God. And he strove against an angel and prevailed; he wept and sought his favor. At Bethel he found him, and there he spoke with us—

Hosea covers the whole of Jacob’s story: in the womb he grasped his brother’s heel; as a grown man “he strove with God”; and in the very next line “he strove against an angel and prevailed.” Within two lines, the prophet calls the one Jacob strove with both God and an angel. The word the YLV renders “angel” here is malakh, the same word Jacob used on his deathbed: “the messenger who has redeemed me.”

In the line that follows, “At Bethel he found him, and there he spoke with us,” the prophet ties the one Jacob wrestled at the Jabbok to the one who met Jacob at Bethel. That is the same Bethel the messenger spoke of in Genesis 31:13, when He said, “I am the God of Bethel.” In Hosea’s single sentence, the opponent of the Jabbok and the God of Bethel are one.

Five Names for One Event

Different speakers use different words, but they are all speaking about the same One. The messenger declared Himself to be the God of Bethel. The narrator calls the opponent at the Jabbok a man, yet Jacob named the place the face of God. Hosea calls that same opponent God and malakh in successive lines, and says He was found at Bethel. And Jacob, at his death, calls the messenger his redeemer.

What binds these passages together is not a shared word. It is a shared event. Jacob met Someone, and the different passages describe that one meeting from different sides: as it looked, as Jacob understood it, and as the prophet remembered it.

The last name differs from the others. “God,” “man,” “angel” all say what He is, or in what form He stood. Ha-goel says something else. As Chapter 2 showed, it is a participle with an object, and it says what He did for Jacob. The first names describe Him. The last one tells what He had done.

The One Who Held Him

The messenger Jacob called goel is the man who had held him at the Jabbok: One who stood in the form of a man, was called the face of God, was recorded as a messenger, and was at the last confessed as redeemer.

When Jacob said “the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil,” then, he was not reaching for a pious phrase. He was speaking of One he had heard say “I am the God of Bethel,” and One he had wrestled with through a whole night. The name ha-goel הַגֹּאֵל gaw-al' was not a title newly invented at his deathbed. It was the last name he gave to the One he had lived with.

But there is one more line in Genesis 32, and it may be the most important. When the sun rose on Jacob, it did not rise on a champion walking away from a contest.