The Meeting Came First

There are two ways a person can come to speak about God. One is to learn the words first, from teachers or books, and then to look for those words in one’s own life. The other is to live through something first and only afterward find words for it. Jacob’s words in Genesis 48 belong to the second kind.

Jacob did not first learn the idea of a redeemer and then fit his life to it. He looked back over what had happened to him and gave it a name. The meeting came first, and the name followed.

Naming What He Had Lived

Here again is how Jacob names God when he blesses Joseph’s sons.

Genesis 48:15-16 And he blessed Joseph and said, "The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has shepherded me all my life long unto this day, 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."

There are three ways of naming, and each one looks back over Jacob’s life.

The first is “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked.” This is what Jacob received from those before him. Abraham and Isaac had walked before this God, and Jacob had heard of Him from them.

The second is “the God who has shepherded me all my life long unto this day.” Here Jacob speaks of his own life from beginning to end. A shepherd leads, feeds, and guards, and Jacob, who had kept Laban’s flocks for twenty years, knew what that meant. He says that God had done this for him through all his days, up to the very day on which he spoke.

The third is “the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil.” It is this third name that carries goel. And it is a name drawn from particular events: the messenger who spoke to him in Haran, the man who held him at the Jabbok.

The words “from all evil” have a history. When Jacob stood before Pharaoh in Egypt, he summed up his life this way.

Genesis 47:9 And Jacob said to Pharaoh, "The days of the years of my sojournings are a hundred and thirty years; few and evil have been the days of the years of my life (chai חַי khah'-ee), and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life (chai) of my fathers in the days of their sojournings."

He did not pretend his life had been easy. He had fled from his brother, served twenty years in a house where his wages were changed ten times, buried Rachel on the road, and mourned Joseph as dead for many years. The same old man who called his days evil now says that the messenger had redeemed him from all evil. He is not speaking from theory. He is speaking from a life in which the evil had been real, and so had the redemption.

One Event Behind the Names

As Chapters 4 through 6 showed, the messenger Jacob calls goel here is the One who said, “I am the God of Bethel” (Genesis 31:13), and the man who wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbok, whom Jacob called God and Hosea called both God and malakh. What binds these passages together is not a word. It is an event. Jacob had met this One, and that meeting is the ground under the name.

Then, as he blesses his twelve sons one by one, at the close of what he says over the tribe of Dan, the word yeshuah appears: “For your salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw) I wait, O LORD” (Genesis 49:18). This is the first place in the Bible where the word salvation stands. The first man in Scripture to say “redeemer” and the first to say “salvation” is the same man, and he is a man who had been met.

Jacob Named Places the Same Way

This order, the meeting first and the name after, runs through Jacob’s whole story. Again and again he gives a name to a place because of something that happened to him there.

In each case the meeting comes first and the name records it. Jacob did not name Bethel and then wait for God to appear there. He woke from the dream and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16), and then he named it.

The names in Genesis 48 and 49 follow the same pattern. They are not place names but names for God, and they come at the end of his life rather than on the road. But they are made the same way. Jacob had been met, and he named what had met him.

Even at his deathbed he tells the story of a meeting before he blesses. His first words to Joseph in Genesis 48 are not a blessing but a memory.

Genesis 48:3 And Jacob said to Joseph, "God Almighty (El Shaddai) appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and blessed me,

Only after recalling that meeting does he go on to bless.

A Summary of a Life

This has a consequence for how we read Jacob’s three names. They are not a summary of doctrine. They are a summary of what he had lived.

That does not make them less true. It makes them true in a particular way. A doctrine can be learned from someone else and repeated without ever having been tested. A name drawn from experience has been tested in the experience itself. When Jacob calls the messenger his goel, he is not telling his sons what he has been taught about God. He is telling them who brought him through.

This is also why Jacob could be the first to say these words. There was no law of the goel yet, no prophet who had spoken of salvation, no book of Scripture he could read. What Jacob had was the promise handed down from Abraham and Isaac, and what had actually happened in his own life. The names came out of those two.

The reason Jacob was the first to cry out yeshuah is that he had met God. “I have seen God face to face,” he said at the Jabbok (Genesis 32:31).

What Kind of Meeting?

What kind of meeting had Jacob been through? Jacob himself said it was God he had seen. It was not like the burning bush, where God appeared in a flame. Jacob met One who stood in the form of a man, who spoke as God, and who touched his body.

Students of Scripture use particular words for the different ways in which God made Himself seen in the Old Testament. Used carefully, they help to say what the text records at Bethel and the Jabbok, and how it differs from what happened in Bethlehem. The first of those words is theophany.