Genesis 32:28

Jacob is on this road because God told him to go back to the land of his fathers (Genesis 31:3), and years before, at Bethel, God had promised to be with him and to bring him home (Genesis 28:10–22). Even so, he is afraid. Twenty years earlier he had taken Esau’s birthright and then, by deceiving their father, Esau’s blessing (Genesis 27), and now word has come that Esau is approaching with four hundred men (Genesis 32:6). Jacob has divided his people and flocks into two bands (Genesis 32:7–8), prayed earnestly for deliverance (Genesis 32:9–12), and sent wave after wave of gifts ahead to win Esau over (Genesis 32:13–21). Everything that could be planned has been planned.

Then “he rose up that night”. The verb qûwm is the ordinary word for rising or standing up, and Jacob gets up and acts while it is still dark. The night, layil, is the plain word for the hours of darkness. Taking a large household of women and small children through a river ford in the dark was dangerous, and it shows how pressing Jacob’s fear had become. Scripture tells of other great nights when God acted for his people. He showed Abram the stars (Genesis 15:5) and made his covenant with him after the sun went down (Genesis 15:12–17), and he brought Israel out of Egypt on the night of the Passover (Exodus 12:29–31).

Jacob met God himself in this man. “And Jacob was left alone.” The verb yâthar means to remain or be left over, and Jacob is what remains of the whole company once the rest have crossed. Then “there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day”. The verb ʼâbaq means to grapple or wrestle. Strong’s ties it to the word for dust and gives its sense as “to bedust”, the dust two men raise as they struggle at close quarters. The struggle lasted the whole night.

The verse calls him a man, ʼîysh, the ordinary word for a man or a male person, and that is how he came to Jacob, in a body Jacob could seize and hold. The rest of the passage shows who he is. He has the right to bless Jacob and to change his name, and when it is over Jacob says, “I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30). The prophet Hosea, looking back, says that Jacob strove with God and “had power over the angel” (Hosea 12:3–4).

Believers differ on who exactly the man was. Some hold that he was the Son of God, appearing in human form long before he took flesh, so that Jacob wrestled with the one who would later be born as Jesus. Others hold that he was an angel sent by God and speaking with God’s own authority, which fits Hosea’s word “angel”. On either reading God came to Jacob in person, in a form Jacob could grasp, and the whole encounter was God’s own doing.

Verse 25 opens, “And when he saw that he prevailed not against him”. The verb yâkôl means to be able, to have power, to overcome or prevail. People ask whether this means God was unable to overcome Jacob. The next words answer it: with one touch the man puts Jacob’s hip out of joint, so the outcome was in his hand all along, and he had chosen to meet Jacob strength for strength through the night. What the long struggle brought out was Jacob’s own tenacity, the stubborn grip of a man who had always fought for what he wanted.

The verb for “touched”, nâgaʻ, means to touch or lay the hand upon, to reach, and also to strike. The hollow of the thigh is the socket of the hip, a joint a man’s strength depends on. The words “out of joint” translate yâqaʻ, which Strong’s explains as “to sever oneself”, and so to be dislocated. It happened “as he wrestled with him”, in the middle of the struggle.

Jacob had lived by his own strength and cunning, against Esau (Genesis 27) and against Laban (Genesis 31). In one moment the strength he trusted is gone, and what he does next shows what has changed: he clings. Paul learned the same lesson through his thorn in the flesh, when the Lord told him, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

“And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.” The verb ʼâmar is the ordinary word for saying. “Let me go” is shâlach, to send or send away, so the man is saying “send me away”, and Jacob answers with the same verb: “I will not let thee go.” The words “the day breaketh” are literally “the dawn goes up”. The man sets the end of the meeting at daybreak. The time appointed for it was ending, and the new day would bring Jacob face to face with Esau.

Jacob can wrestle no longer, but he can still hold on, and he does. He asks for a blessing, bârak. Strong’s links the word to kneeling and, by implication, to blessing, and when God blesses a man he gives him his favour and his good. Twenty years before, Jacob had gained a blessing by disguising himself before his blind father. Now he asks openly, of God himself, and his only hold is a crippled man’s grip. The blessing he wants is the one God promised to Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3) and to Isaac (Genesis 26:3–4), and he wants to know it is his. Hosea says that in this struggle Jacob prevailed (Hosea 12:3–4). The Gospels show the same persistent faith in the Canaanite woman who kept pleading with Jesus (Matthew 15:21–28).

Now Jacob asks, shâʼal, a verb meaning to ask, inquire or request: “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.” The man answers with a question of his own, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?”, “and he blessed him there”. God reveals himself on his own terms. Among the nations, knowing the name of a god or a powerful being was often thought to give a person a hold over him, and the man’s question gently turns Jacob from what he wants to know to what he has already been given.

Scripture shows the same reserve elsewhere. When Manoah asks the angel of the LORD his name, he is told that it is secret (Judges 13:18). God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8–9), and when God does make his name known to Moses as I AM, the name speaks of his own being (Exodus 3:13–15).

The blessing is the answer to Jacob’s question. “Blessed” is bârak, the same verb as in verse 26, so Jacob receives exactly what he refused to let go without. He learns who this is by what he does for him, and “there”, at Peniel, the blessing is given.

Jacob names the place Pᵉnûwʼêl, “face of God”, a name made from the word for face and El, “God”. Naming a place after what God did there made it a memorial for everyone who came after. The word for God, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, a plural of majesty when it names the true God, and its verbs are usually singular. The word for face, pânîym, is also plural in form and always used as a singular, and its senses of front, surface and presence grow out of the face itself. “Face to face” means that Jacob met God directly and in person.

“And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him.” Penuel is the same name as Peniel in another spelling. “Passed over” is ʻâbar again, the crossing verb of verse 23. The night is over, the day the man spoke of has come, and it is the day Jacob meets Esau.

“And he halted upon his thigh.” The verb tsâlaʻ means to limp, to walk unevenly on one side, which the KJV calls halting. Jacob, the man who had always walked by his own strength, goes to meet his brother limping. He carries the blessing and the wound together, and the limp is the plain sign that he met God and that God changed him.

Verse 32 steps out of the story to explain a custom: “Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day.” The sinew, gîyd, is a tendon or cord, which Strong’s calls a “thong”. The words “which shrank” translate nâsheh, which the lexicons take as the name of the thigh sinew itself, the sciatic nerve. Strong’s derives it from nâshâh, “to forget”, in the sense of something that fails. The reason follows: “because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank.” The verb for “touched” is nâgaʻ, the same verb as in verse 25.

“Unto this day” means that the custom was in force when Genesis was written. It is a food custom older than the law given through Moses, rooted in what happened to the father of the nation. Observant Jews keep it still. The sinew, the gid hanasheh, is removed from the hindquarters of an animal, a work called nikkur, and where it is left in, the hindquarters are often left uneaten. So at the table Israel remembered the night that gave them their name, the way God told his people to pass on his words to their children (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).

The night at the Jabbok points forward to another night of wrestling. In Gethsemane Jesus prayed in agony to his Father until his sweat was like drops of blood (Luke 22:39–44, Matthew 26:36–46). Jacob wrestled for a blessing for himself. Jesus wrestled in prayer and submitted to his Father’s will to win the blessing of salvation for others. His victory came through the weakness of the cross, where he forgave our sins and triumphed over the powers (Colossians 2:13–15).

Jacob saw the face of God for a night. In Christ the face of God has been shown to us: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the shining of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his nature (Hebrews 1:3), and in him the whole fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). John promises that when he appears we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2).

Jacob was given a new name. Everyone who is in Christ is “a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17), is given the right to become a son of God (John 1:12), walks in newness of life (Romans 6:4), and is promised a new name (Revelation 2:17). Jacob clung to God for a blessing. God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3), and all his promises are yea and amen in him (2 Corinthians 1:20).

God came to Jacob at the lowest point of his life, alone, afraid and in the dark, and he came close enough to be held. He kept the promise he had made at Bethel, and he kept it by wrestling with Jacob all night. He broke Jacob’s strength with a touch and then let the weakened man hold him, waited for him to say his own name, and gave him a better one. He kept his own name hidden and showed who he is by blessing.

The passage gives us a God who wounds and blesses in the same night, and whose wound is part of the blessing. Jacob walked away from Peniel limping, alive, and renamed. His descendants carried the name Israel and remembered the night at every meal that kept the custom. Jacob’s prayer, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me”, stands in Scripture as a prayer God answered, and the God who answered it is the same God who has now shown his face in Jesus Christ.