NOTES for Gen 32:1-32
The successful resolution of the story with Laban did not mean that all the trials were behind him. In addition to meeting Laban, Jacob still had to meet his own brother, Esau, and it was not clear which of the two meetings was more dangerous for him. After everything Jacob had done at home, he could hardly count on a warm welcome. He understood this perfectly well: the gifts he sent ahead, intended for his brother, were meant, if not to make amends for his guilt, then at least to begin reconciliation.
Moreover, the messengers were to testify that Jacob no longer claimed anything, that he respected Esau and was ready to acknowledge Esau's primacy. During his time with Laban, Jacob had clearly changed, and now he wants to testify to this before his brother in order, if possible, to avoid conflict. The danger of conflict, however, still existed: Jacob could not know in advance how Esau would behave when they met. In such a situation he needed God's intervention more than ever, perhaps even more than before, when he fled from Laban.
And it happened, 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, assuming, apparently, that a human being can sometimes defeat an angel, but God never and in no way. Meanwhile, much becomes clearer if we start from the fact that originally the event was narrated by Jacob himself, and narrated as a man of his own age would tell it.
In his time blessing meant not support and not goodwill, but the transfer to the blessed person of power, supernatural power, the kind that all gods and spirits were then thought to possess. This power could also be taken away. More than that, in order to receive the power of some god or spirit, one had to defeat him in single combat. Jacob wrestles with his God just as he would have wrestled with the god or spirit of any of his contemporaries, in order to receive power that would be very useful to him the next day when he met his brother. Objectively, this should have involved a stormy ecstasy experienced by Jacob, one of those that in those days, and later as well, sometimes accompanied theophanies. During such an ecstasy it would be no wonder to dislocate a hip, as happened to Jacob.
But the blessing turned out not to be what Jacob expected: instead of power he receives a new name, as his ancestor Abraham once did when he met God. The change of name then and now meant the same thing: spiritual renewal, a kind of initiation after which a person becomes different. Jacob changes inwardly. That is the blessing he received. It was not what he expected, but it was absolutely necessary for him as the leader of the people of God.