NOTES for Gen 32:1-32
The successful resolution of the story with Laban did not mean that all the trials were over. Besides meeting Laban, Jacob still had to meet his own brother Esau, and it was unclear which of the two encounters was more dangerous for him. After everything Jacob had done at home, he could hardly expect a warm welcome. He naturally understood this perfectly well: the gifts he sent ahead for his brother were intended, if not to atone for his guilt, then at least to begin a reconciliation.
Moreover, the messengers had to testify that Jacob no longer laid claim to anything, that he respected Esau and was prepared to acknowledge his precedence. Jacob had evidently changed during his time with Laban, and now he wanted to show this to his brother so as to avoid a conflict if possible. Yet the danger of conflict still existed: Jacob could not know beforehand how Esau would behave when they met. He needed God’s intervention in such a situation as never before, perhaps even more than when he had fled from Laban.
And it came, on the very night before the meeting with Esau. The biblical account of Jacob’s struggle with God for a blessing raises so many questions for readers today that translators sometimes even interpret it as a struggle with an angel, apparently assuming that a man might sometimes defeat an angel, but could certainly never defeat God in any way. Yet much becomes clearer if we proceed from the fact that Jacob himself originally recounted the event, and recounted it as a man of his age.
In his time, a blessing was not support or favor but the transmission to the person blessed of power, a supernatural power which, people then believed, all gods and spirits possessed. This power could also be taken away. More than that, to receive the power of a god or spirit, one had precisely to defeat it in single combat.
Jacob struggles with his God just as any of his contemporaries would have struggled with a god or spirit, struggling to receive power that would be very useful to him the next day when he met his brother. Objectively speaking, this most likely concerned a turbulent ecstasy experienced by Jacob, one of those that in those days, and later as well, sometimes accompanied theophanies. During such an ecstasy it would have been easy to dislocate one’s hip, as happened to Jacob.
Yet the blessing proved different from what Jacob expected: instead of power he receives a new name, just as his ancestor Abraham once did when he met God. Both then and now, a change of name meant the same thing: spiritual renewal, a kind of initiation after which a person becomes different. Jacob changes inwardly; this is the blessing he receives. It is not the blessing he expected, but it is absolutely necessary for him as the leader of God’s people.