Jacob and the Angel
Jacob and Rachel by Caper Luyken.
TRICKY LABAN. FUTURE TRIBES. JACOB WRESTLES WITH AN ANGEL.
Jacob married two sisters and acquired their two servant women in the bargain. From these four wives came the ancestors of Israel’s twelve tribes. But why did he end up wrestling with an angel until daybreak?
Jacob left Bethel and proceeded northward to Aram (present-day Syria), where he met up with his uncle Laban (Rebekah’s brother). Laban had two daughters, Leah and Rachel. Jacob was immediately smitten with Rachel and agreed with Laban to acquire her as a wife in exchange for seven years’ labor. On the night of their wedding, however, Laban switched brides, and the unknowing Jacob ended up sleeping with Leah instead. He had to work for Laban another seven years to get Rachel.
The person of Laban, Jacob’s uncle, provides one of those rare instances in which ancient and modern interpreters have little to quibble about: everyone dislikes him. In the Bible, Laban is consistently presented as a hypocrite—nice enough on the outside, but deep inside a greedy and nasty fellow lacking in any moral scruple. This may well have been something of an Israelite stereotype of the Arameans; in keeping with the genre of the schematic narrative, this view is transmitted in a few deft, telling details. Take, for example, Laban’s first appearance on the biblical scene, when Abraham has dispatched his servant to Aram to find a bride for Isaac (Genesis 24). The servant meets Rebekah at the well and immediately understands that she is the perfect candidate:
When the camels had finished drinking, the man took a gold nose-ring weighing a half shekel, and two bracelets for her arms weighing ten gold shekels, and said, “Tell me whose daughter you are. Is there room in your father’s house for us to spend the night?” She said to him, “I am the daughter of Bethuel son of Milcah, whom she bore to Nahor.” She added, “We have plenty of straw and fodder and a place to spend the night.” The man bowed his head and worshiped the LORD and said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the LORD has led me on the way to the house of my master’s kin.”
Then the girl ran and told her mother’s household about these things. Rebekah had a brother whose name was Laban; and Laban ran out to the man, to the spring. When he saw the nose-ring, as well as the bracelets on his sister’s arms, and when he heard the words of his sister Rebekah, “Thus the man spoke to me,” he went to the man; and there he was, standing by the camels at the spring. He said, “Come in, O blessed of the LORD. Why do you stand outside when I have prepared the house and a place for the camels?”
Surely we are meant to take the broad hint in this passage: it is when Laban sees the generous gifts that this stranger has bestowed on his sister—“the nose-ring, as well as the bracelets on his sister’s arms”—that he puts out the welcome mat. Indeed, he offers Abraham’s servant his most pious, unctuous greeting, “Come in, O blessed of the LORD. Why do you stand outside?”
One might compare this scene to Laban’s behavior in the present context, that is, just as Jacob has completed the same long journey northward and found Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel at (presumably) the same well:
While he was still speaking with [the men at the well], Rachel arrived with her father’s sheep; for she was a shepherd. Now when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of his mother’s brother Laban, and the sheep of his mother’s brother Laban, Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of his mother’s brother Laban. Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and wept aloud. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s kinsman and that he was Rebekah’s son; and she ran and told her father. When Laban heard the news about his sister’s son Jacob, he ran to meet him; he embraced him and kissed him, and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh!” And he stayed with him a month. Then Laban said to Jacob, “Just because you are my kinsman, should you serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?”
Once again, it seems, we are meant to be struck by the contrast between Laban’s words and deeds. On the outside, Laban is the loving uncle: “Surely you are my bone and my flesh!” he says, and kisses his young nephew. But such sentiments do not, apparently, prevent him from taking advantage of the new arrival: Laban puts him to work right away, without any discussion of remuneration. Only after a month does he ask Jacob, as if the thought had just now occurred to him, “Just because you are my kinsman, should you serve me for nothing?”
But if the reader/listener is prepared to pick up on such traits, he or she is probably not unfamiliar with Jacob and his own particular (and by now, well known) set of stereotypical characteristics. So it is certainly no accident that his attraction to Rachel is not presented in the above passage as altogether romantic, the instantaneous marriage of true minds. What the text says instead is: “When Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of his mother’s brother Laban, and the sheep of his mother’s brother Laban.” Laban, apparently, is not a poor man; he has a nice little flock of sheep, and Jacob, the text is telling us, seems to have fixed on this right away. To put it in more modern terms, it is as if Rachel has just driven up in the stylish little sports car her dad gave her for graduation; the narrative seems to be hinting that this, as much as her comely appearance, is what pushes Jacob to his exertions on her behalf. And this too has a point. Though Laban is certainly nasty and Jacob is certainly not, the two are nevertheless blood relatives—and when it comes to trickiness, they are not so terribly different from each other after all. Indeed, in the end, Jacob will outfox his uncle.
The Switched Brides
Jacob’s love for Rachel is frustrated: tricky Laban substitutes his less attractive, older daughter, Leah, for Rachel on their wedding night. Jacob wakes up, “and in the morning, behold! It was Leah” (Gen. 29:25). The story of the switched brides has been remembered, and puzzled over, by generations and generations of Bible readers. How could Jacob not know who was in his bed that night? Ancient interpreters offered several possibilities: Perhaps Jacob had drunk a bit too much wine at the festivities. And no doubt, in keeping with Oriental modesty, the bride must have been heavily veiled even after the ceremony. Plus, it surely was quite dark in the bridal chamber. Still, one rabbinic text offered a further, pungent explanation:
All night he kept calling her “Rachel” and she kept answering him, “Yes.” But “in the morning, behold! It was Leah” [Gen. 29:25]. He said to her, “Liar and daughter-of-a-liar!” Leah answered: “Can there be a schoolmaster without any pupils? Was it not just this way that your father called out to you ‘Esau’ and you answered him [by saying ‘Yes’]? So when you called out [Rachel], I answered you the same way.”
Genesis Rabba 70:19
Apart from what switching the brides showed about Laban’s trickiness, his act had another important implication: although Jacob had to work another seven years to pay for Rachel, he ended up with two wives—and as a bonus, their two female servants (Bilhah and Zilpah) were ultimately given to him as concubines. The result was a very large family indeed: Jacob and his four mates produced twelve different sons (plus a daughter, Dinah), the future twelve tribes of Israel.
Indeed, the story of Jacob’s dealings with his uncle seemed to ancient interpreters to contain an overall message. After all, the Labans of this world are numerous, and the path of a decent person is always beset with encounters just like that of Jacob and his scheming, more powerful relative. The point, however, is that, try as they will, the Labans ultimately lose out. Jacob may have worked for his uncle for twenty years,29 but he ended up with descendants who founded twelve tribes and, ultimately, a mighty nation. Moreover—through a maneuver (Gen. 31:37–43) that may have looked a bit tricky but, by ancient interpreters’ lights, surely was not1—Jacob ended up taking possession of much of Laban’s flocks. In short, this raw refugee who had arrived in Aram with the pack on his back left two decades later as a wealthy paterfamilias. Could there be a clearer demonstration of God’s provident care for His servants—“The LORD watches over all those who love Him, but all the wicked He destroys” (Ps. 145:20)?
The final confrontation between the two—when Laban catches up with his departing nephew at the border between Aram and Canaan—seemed to sum up everything about their two characters:
Laban said to Jacob, “What have you done? You tricked me and carried off my own daughters like captives in war! Why did you skulk off in secret and try to fool me and not tell me? Why, I would have sent you away with a party and songs, tambourines and lyres . . .”
Then Jacob became angry, and argued with Laban. Jacob said to Laban, “What exactly is my crime? What wrong have I committed, that you should come chasing after me? . . . These twenty years that I’ve been with you, your ewes and your female goats never miscarried, and I have not eaten the rams from any of your flocks. If an animal was killed by wild beasts I never brought it to [show to] you. Instead, I bore the loss myself; you charged me for every one. I’ve been cheated day and night. I used to—why, during the day, the heat would consume me, and the cold by night; I never did get a good night’s sleep. Of the twenty years I’ve been in your house, I worked for you for fourteen years for your two daughters, and then six more with your flock. You kept changing the terms of my wages, time and again. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Kinsman of Isaac, had not been on my side, by now you would have sent me off empty-handed. But God saw my affliction and how I had labored, and He rebuked you last night.”
But Laban cried back at Jacob, “The daughters are my daughters, the sons are my sons, the flocks are my flocks, and all that you see belongs to me.”
Throughout this exchange, Laban’s true nature is apparent to all. If only you had told me you were going, the hypocrite says to Jacob, “I would have sent you away with a party and songs, tambourines and lyres. . . .” But surely no reader can believe that. Jacob then lays out in detail all the ways that Laban has tried to take advantage of him, adding what, for ancient interpreters, was the point of the whole story: God did watch out for Jacob’s interests, and that is what ultimately allowed him to triumph. Yet, almost to the bitter end, Laban continued to deceive himself—and anyone else who would listen. Though Jacob had paid for his wives fair and square, Laban seems to have felt they still belonged to him—indeed, he even claims possession of Jacob’s own sons and the flocks that Jacob has earned: “The daughters are my daughters, the sons are my sons, the flocks are my flocks, and all that you see belongs to me.” Only in the last sentences of their story together does Laban propose to make his peace with God’s chosen servant (Gen. 31:51–54).2
Brides and Tribes
Modern scholars have regarded with some skepticism the biblical account of the origins of the people of Israel—that the entire nation was descended from a single ancestor, Jacob/Israel. Apart from the fact that Israel’s twelve tribes were dispersed over a wide geographic area and throughout most of their history seem to have shown rather little unity, scholarly skepticism derives from a number of anthropological studies that have been carried out in Africa and elsewhere with the purpose of investigating the role that genealogies, real or imagined, can play in a region’s social and political organization. Native informants who are asked about the origin of this or that group of adjacent tribes or clans will often point to a common ancestor of all. The existence of such a common ancestor, anthropologists say, can serve a definite political or social function. It can unite all the groups as putative relatives—so that all members are deemed to be grandchildren, or great-great-great-great-grandchildren, of a single man or woman. Such a notion can be an important factor when unity is crucial—for example, it can persuade all members to accept a common leadership or to participate in warfare or some other common venture.
At the same time, the precise relationship of this or that group to a distinguished forebear may also function as an expression of rank: if group A are direct descendants of the forebear, whereas B are descendant from his brother or nephew or the like, then the genealogy will have placed A in a superior ranking to B. Ranking can also take place horizontally, as, for example, five sons of the same father. In many societies, the eldest son in such a situation will be understood to be the preferred one, and his descendants, therefore, the preferred group. If the father has children by different wives, their social rank will also reflect on that of their descendants. Finally, one of the most fascinating observations of anthropologists is that reported genealogies tend to change over time in order to take account of changes in the social or political pecking order. Group So-and-so, previously reported to be descended from the firstborn, may be replaced by a new “firstborn” in the reports of informants a generation or two later.3
The applicability of such studies to biblical material is not hard to spot. If, for example, Abraham had one “legitimate” wife, Sarah, and a concubine, Hagar, then Sarah’s descendants (Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau, along with their offspring) will surely be deemed to outrank the descendants of Hagar’s son, Ishmael, and his offspring. Similarly, if Jacob has twelve sons, then the tribes descended from his “legitimate” wives, Leah and Rachel, will outrank those descended from his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah. What is more, the fact that some tribes are said to be descended from the same mother as well as the same father will signal a greater level of kinship among them: the “Leah tribes” will be closer to one another than to the “Rachel tribes,” for example.
In considering such matters, modern biblical scholars have also noticed the confluence of genealogy with geography. Of Leah’s first four sons, three—Reuben, Simeon, and Judah—were said to have sired Israel’s southernmost tribes (her fourth son, Levi, was, by the Bible’s account, not given any territory to speak of). The descent of these three tribes from a common mother was thus paralleled by their geographical contiguity. To the north of them lay the great midland of Israel, and it was populated by the descendants of Rachel—the tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim and Manasseh. Here too, apparently, genetic closeness meant geographic proximity.
Which came first, geography or genealogy? To modern scholars, the answer seems to be geography. They theorize that the peoples who eventually became the nation of Israel had originally been separate, perhaps quite unrelated, groups. When they eventually did come together, their union was cemented by a tale of common descent—all came from the same father. This basic story of their interrelatedness was further refined by the existence of different mothers: the Rachel tribes were one subgroup, and the Leah tribes were a separate subgroup. The union of these two, history was to prove, was never perfect: brought together by the diplomacy (or was it power politics?) of David in the tenth century BCE, they parted company after only two generations, with the southern tribes becoming the Kingdom of Judah and the northern ones the Kingdom of Israel. Thus, the “fact” that they came from different mothers was an expression from the very beginning of the distinctness of these two groups. As for the tribes descended from the concubines Bilhah and Zilpah—no wonder that they were on the geographic outskirts of David’s united kingdom! They were not thought of as total outsiders, since they had been included among Jacob’s descendants, but they were, in ancestry as well as geographically, on the margins from the start.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible are stories about how a person’s name gets changed: Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and, in the episode that follows his last confrontation with Laban, Jacob becomes Israel. (Nor is he the last biblical figure to have his name changed; a bit later, Moses’ servant Hoshea will become Joshua [Num. 13:16], Gideon will become Jerubbaal [Judg. 6:28–32], and so forth.) In keeping with the biblical narratives themselves, ancient interpreters attached great significance to such changes: they seemed to mark important transition points in the life of the person involved, and the new name was often deemed to contain some special teaching. Indeed, Philo of Alexandria authored an entire treatise called “The Change of Names.”
Modern scholars, however, see a different motive behind such narratives: their purpose was to harmonize what had originally been independent traditions about the same, or possibly different, figures. Thus, the variations Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah may reflect dialect differences in the transmission of stories about this founding couple: certainly it is significant that both names are changed at the same time (Genesis 17)—almost as if a writer or editor were closing one book of traditions and opening another, one that had originated in a different locale and so had a slightly different version of the couple’s names. Sometimes, scholars note, there is no such attempt to harmonize different traditions and the Bible offers no change-of-names story at all. Instead, a given person is simply identified with more than one name. Thus, Moses’ father-in-law is known principally by the name Jethro (Exod. 3:1; 4:18, etc.), but he is also called Reuel (Exod. 2:18; Num. 10:29), Jether (Exod. 4:18),4 and Hobab (Judg. 4:11; in Num. 10:29 Hobab is said to be Jethro’s son). Here too it would seem that different traditions are simply being combined. Jacob’s last son is named Ben-oni by his dying mother, Rachel, but Jacob calls him Benjamin (Gen. 35:18); perhaps these at one point were also competing names.
In the case of Esau, his “other name,” Edom, seems to reflect the complex ethnic composition of the land associated with him. That territory was, according to the biblical account, originally an enclave of one people, the Horites (Hurrians), until the Edomites displaced them (Deut. 2:2). (Logically, eponymous “Edom” ought to have completely displaced the earlier founder figure, Esau—but as Genesis and other biblical books attest, Esau continued to be spoken of as the Edomites’ legendary ancestor.) While some scholars are skeptical of the biblical account in Deut. 2:2, there seems no doubt that different ethnic groups at one point lived in proximity to one another in the area of Edom; it was not a homogeneous whole. Indeed, Egyptian records suggest that, for a while, Se‘ir (the name of Edom’s mountain) and Edom were considered to be different entities. So, one way or another, the figure of Esau/Edom probably represents the fusion of two originally distinct figures.
With Jacob and Israel the picture is, according to biblicists, rather similar. The name “Jacob-El” (presumably, “[the god] El protects”) is actually known from a number of places in the ancient Near East even before the time of Jacob; it seems to modern scholars that our “Jacob” was thus an abbreviated form of this same name and belonged to a person, legendary or historical, who was held to be the founder of at least part of the future Israel.5 “Israel” is also a plausible ancient Semitic name for a person (literally, “[the god] El rules” or “God rules”). This name is not attested nearly so early; it appears for the first time in an Egyptian stele30 from the time of the exodus and apparently referred there to some kind of group or tribe. A patriarch named “Israel” may thus have originally been deemed the founder of such a group, which at some later point merged with the “Jacob-El” group, hence the necessity for Jacob’s name to be changed to “Israel” at some point in his life. This name change is actually recounted twice (Gen. 32:27–28, in a passage attributed to the J source of texts, and 35:9–10, attributed to the E source). Despite this, Jacob continues to be the name by which this biblical figure is principally known.6
Jacob Fights an Angel
The longer version of Jacob’s change of name, discussed briefly above (chapter 7), is one of the best known episodes in the whole Bible:
That same night, Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he took them across the stream, he sent all his possessions across as well. Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of day. When he saw that he could not overcome him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip in its socket, so that the socket of Jacob’s hip was strained in the fight with him. Then he said, “Let go of me, since it is getting to be dawn.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He said, “What is your name?” and he answered, “Jacob.” He said, “Your name will not be Jacob any longer, but Israel, since you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.” Then Jacob said to him, “Please, now, tell me your name.” He answered, “Why should you be asking for my name?” and he blessed him there. Jacob named the place Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face and yet my life has been spared.”
Gen. 32:24–30
For a modern scholar, every element in this schematic narrative has a point to it. Jacob’s wrestling (ye’abeq) with the “man” is meant to connect with the name of the place, the Jabbok (yabboq) ford. The wound to Jacob’s hip also has an etiological resonance, explained later on: “That is why the children of Israel to this day do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the socket of the hip, since Jacob’s hip socket was wrenched at the thigh” (Gen. 32:32).31 Then, as seen earlier (chapter 7), Jacob’s change of name is connected to this same struggle. Instead of explaining his new name, Israel (yisra’el), as “God rules,” the narrative suggests that it comes from a homonymous root meaning struggle: “You have struggled (sarita) with God and with men and have prevailed.” Finally, the place itself was called Peniel/Penuel to commemorate this face-to-face (panim) combat with God (’el) that took place.
Indeed, for modern scholars there is something very suggestive about how these disparate elements have been combined into a single narrative line. Start off with the three basic proper names involved—yabboq, yisra’el, and peni’el—and throw them together; what do you get? Once yabboq has suggested ye’abeq, “he struggles,” then some sort of combat is involved. Yisra’el may be then seen to reinforce the idea of struggle and refine it: his struggling (yisra) must have involved God (’el). Still more precisely, the struggle must have involved seeing God’s face (peni’el). In a manner strangely reminiscent of Freud’s explanation of how the unconscious creates dreams,7 all these elements might be seen to have cooperated in the creation of the biblical combat narrative, to which a final etiological note—connecting Jacob’s injury with Israel’s later avoidance of the thigh muscle—has then been added.
And yet . . . To say this is hardly to say all. As we saw earlier, there is something quite eerie, and most evocative, about this combat—the “man” who is suddenly not a man at all but God Himself; the fight that turns out to have been something else entirely, carried on in the “fog” in which Jacob was plunged; perhaps most of all, a narrative that seems to bespeak a most real encounter that took place long, long ago. No wonder this brief episode begins with the mention of Jacob’s sending everyone and everything to the other side of the stream; only thus could this fight ever take place, when the noise of voices in the tents had died down and night had fallen and Jacob found that he “was left alone.”
To read this episode in Genesis is, once again, to brush up against the central question of this book. Which way of reading is the right one? Modern scholars certainly seem to have a lot of the truth—the etiological side of these narratives, their connection with Israelite history and geography, the process of composition and compilation that stands behind them. And yet . . . So many of these stories are about God and His interaction with human beings. This statement may sound obvious, but it has implications. To focus only on politics and history and national stereotypes is certainly to walk right past the most basic thing about these stories, their very vision of human reality as endlessly connected to, indeed, endlessly interacting with, God. Ancient interpreters may have gone off in their own direction—a highly idealistic and moralistic one, leading ultimately to a world in which “our guys” are altogether good and are usually paired off against such all-bad antitypes as Esau and Laban, a world in which the righteous inevitably triumph and everything works out for the best. But in so doing, they may have (though this remains to be explored) latched onto something else essential in these texts. Or is it the case that both readings are, in equal measure, distortions?