The story of Jacob and the Angel is one of the most cryptic in the Hebrew Scripture. Most commentators cannot agree on the basic components of the text, and many are unsure of its details or origins. The narrative is a scant 9 verses, from Genesis 32:23 to 36. But in those 9 verses, the narrative begins abruptly, repeats on itself, has significant gaps, has figures that are unidentifiable, and has what could be considered a double ending. There are sections that remind us of ancient Canaanite cultic practices, and sections that indicate possible E or even J sources. Even within the book of Genesis itself, the section does not fit. There are some allusions that can tie it back to Exodous 4:24-26, and there is some discussion of wrestling in the fetal narrative of Essau and Jacob, but both of those texts are tenuous at best. There is controversy, ambiguity, and an unsettling almost hostile ambiguity to everything about the text. Every significant word and most significant actions seem primeval, and the inclusion of it in the weft and weave of the Hebrew scripture seems deliberate but strange. The attempts at making it more cohesive result in a poor plastering, so the lack of structure shows through clearly and explicitly.
            Concentrating on the words that have the most ambiguity, the most darkness, and refuse most loudly at integrating into the larger text seems to be the best way of limning the text, pointing at its structure. To be true to the text itself, there will be no attempt at creating a narrative, no attempt at a grand thesis. The passage itself is filled with darkness, with a struggle towards cohesion, with a begging, and a desire for wholeness that leads to brokenness. The story comes from the darkest places in the Hebrew mindset, and to throw light on it will result in long linguistic shadows.
            In this paper, the words and phrases that cast the longest shadows are “man” (Gen 32:23), “wrestled” (ibid) “daybreak” (ibid),   “hip” (v. 26), “blessing” (v. 26), “Jacob” (v. 27),  “Israel” (ibid), and Peunel (v. 30). Using each of these words, will point out the sources for the texts, the ancient controversies, the geographical realities, the cultural contexts, the textual awareness, and  the profound ambiguity that marks this as a passage that should be mediated on, and not necessarily understood.
To put these words into context is to recognize the structural elements of the text. There are three important ways to do this, to realize the structure of and to the text, to see if there is any where else in the Pentateuch where this structure occurs, and to note what the narrative says (including all gaps, brokenness, textual slips, and lacunae.) Starting at the least of these, let us find what the narrative of the scripture actually says, then note where the content is absent, and where it is repeated, where textual work has been done, where it has been done, and what the differences between those texts say.
Beginning with the story: Jacob has been traveling through hostile territory with “his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children,” (Vs 22). He finds himself in the middle of the night at a ford in the Jabbok (an interesting word, because it functions as a triple pun, as a footnote in the Oxford reference Bible notes “ta compicated word play on the names of Jacob (Heb: “ya'qob”, the river “yabboq”, and wrestled “wayye'abeq; v.24). Jacob leaves his property and family unguarded, he fords the river. He finds a mysterious man on the other side, who asks to wrestle so Jacob can pass. They wrestle to a draw. Just before the dawn breaks, the angel flicks or strikes Jacob's hip or thigh, permanently maiming him. Jacob and the angel ask each other their names., and refuse the naming. The angel leaves before day break, his strength significantly weakened, and in this weakening strength, he gets a new name—Israel, which is translated as father of nations. The story ends with a priestly prohibition against eating any flesh that is near an animals thigh bone.
In the midst of this basic story, there are structual elements that might repeat themselves, but there are also gaps, and things left unsaid. The text begins in medias rea, the fording seems to come from almost nowhere. There are two mentions of day break, which may be a repeating and may be a poetic device. There is a significant narrative gap in the second half of verse 23. There is a moving back and forth between the j source and the e source in versus 23 to 26. The verse ends with a dangling, seemingly randomly inserted P source dietary prohibition. There are few parallels in this story to any where else in the first testament.
There are some textual parallels within the various stories of Jacob himself, including some chisamistic connections between the story of Jacob dreaming the ladder, and the story of Jacob wrestling—but even in the ladder narrative, there is a history of prophetic dreaming, and that kind of prophetic dreaming. The lessons that can be gleaned from Jacobs ladder are simpler and cleaner, as clean as Joseph's tales of the thin and fatted calf. These lessons cannot be gleaned as easily and those parallels seem so far away from similar stories of say, Moses or Abraham. Even Jacob's name change into Israel, from “I am struggling” to “father of nations” does not stick, there are any number of examples throughout Genesis where his name changes and functions seperately. Even in becoming Jacob, he never stops becoming Israel.
That even the renaming, something that is supposed to remain permanent, and slips without any solidity, could be construed as a metaphor for the eternity of the text. The structural lack of cohesiveness matches the critical lack of consensus of confusion and confrontation that underlies most of the paratextual working through that surround this passage. Even the most basic questions seem almost unanswerable. There is something so primeval, so basic, and so profoundly other about this text, that it seems to come from the ancient ground of the near east. It does not seem to be a Hebraic text or a Moabite, or an Assyrian, but something stranger, older, and more intensely human. Going through each of the core words here, and pulling the meaning and context from them, I hope to prove that the story is a patched up, plugged in, contextualized attempt to re-moor a story unique in the biblical context.
The first word that has power in the story is man, found in versus 24. Man as in he who wrestled with. The identity of who the man who he wrestled with could be any number of beings, including but not limited to a river demon, a hostile deity, an angel, YHWH or the dark elements of Jacob's own personality itself. Each of these personae has a strong argument behind it. Jabbok is a rough and tumultuous place, with a fast flowing cataract pinched between two almost sheer cliffs. It would be a place where danger lurked, and where enough danger occurred that a demon would be thought to protect it. There is even a river demon, Hubbal, who is popular among the Canaanites, and who the jews of the first testament are warned about repeatedly..
Though this argument has some strength, and it is one that Westerman makes, but it is adroitly torn apart by Bayford “Even more mysterious is the unidentified man whose features and actions have much in common with characters found in cross cultural folk stories, such as the dangerous river demon, a spirit that guards or protects a body of water and a being that must vanish by day break, Westerman therefore identities the being who takes Jacob as a hostile demon or evil spirit...Sarna on the other hand denies the association. Noting , he contends explicitly portrays the man as a dangerous river spirit that blocks humans as they attempt to cross the river. Everyone and everything that Jacob carried across was safe on the other side. Furthermore most often humans attempt to appease these river spirits to ensure a safe cross. Jacob does nothing of the sort. Finally, the mysterious assailant ends up blessing Jacob, an action that Sarna argues cannot be done by a demon in a biblical story. (Bayford, 373)
If the blessing cannot be done by a demon, then who can a blessing be done by? The list would be limited to YHWH or an angel. The other deity, or the spirit of Jacob itself would seem to be eliminated. Gunkel makes several solid arguments that the man who is wrestled, and is convinced that is some kind of deity who is not YHWH or an angel. Most of these arguments centre around issues of naming. The wrestler does not know Jacob, and cowers when his name is asked, suggests that the blessing is done under duress. There are classical and Ancient Near Eastern parallels to demons that disappear in the night, who lose power not only in being named but who lose power when the sun emerges. He continues: “the fact that the deity evades the question among his name... and may be explained by the ancient belief wide spread, among many people that the knowledge of the name gives power over the bearer...(Gunkel, 317)
This makes an interesting argument, and an almost convincing one. It allows for the possiblity that contextualizes ancient practices into a Jewish experience. This could mean that the blessing was an attempt to make Hebrew the world view in which these nomadic/exillic people live. This also could bring the possibility of the wrestling being Jacob himself back on the table. The New Torah commentary explains it thusly: this may be an account of Jacob's wrestling with his conscience, torn between his human tendency to avoid an unpleasant encounter and the divine impulse in him that urges him to do the difficult but right thing. The position my find support in the text "you have striven with beings divine and human (v. 29) which can also be translated "you have striven with God and with men" ...” (New Torah Commentary, 535).
All of this could function simultaneously in a text that is profoundly unstable. It could be an internal struggle, one with a river demon, one with a mysterious deity, none of those are inconsistent with a mutual interest. The one that would prevent a mutuality is if he is wrestling with YHWH, himself. In his president's address to the Canadian Bible Society, Glen Taylor makes the strongest argument in favour of this exclusivity, making the unique argument that Jacob walks across the sun itself, that the sun in quesiton is YHWH: “...Jacob is referring to the sun when he claims to have seen Penuel; “the face of God” In other words, the man with whom Jacob was wrestling was becoming “the face of God” in the form of the rising son. The theory not only accounts for Jacobs reference to seeing God face to face, but it accounts for his own marveling at his survival; just as one cannot look a t the sun in its full intensity, so Jacob survived seeing the face of God because he was tenacious enough to hang on to his opponent long enough to see him only begin to turn into the rising sun. There is a possible problem with the theory. It entails the assumption that the story-writer equates the sun with the face of God, which seems to many people unlikely for an ancient Hebrew patriarch. In partial defense of the theory, recall that by any and all reckonings this story conveys a primitive and highly unusual portrait of the God of Israel. Moreover, I am not interjecting the sun into the story, as if in a desperate attempt to link it with the “face of God” “Dawn” is specefically mentioned twice in the story and “sun” in the summation in v 32. The theory accounts for the presence of references to the sun both in the first and second parts of the story as well as the emphasis on early morning. Contrariwise, most if not all the other explanations fail to reckon with the role of the sun, including it's role as the only common denomination linking man and seeing the face of God”
This would be a useful, if not entirely convincing way, of sorting out the ancient implications of the text, of YHWHizing the text, and by extension, explaining away how Jacob saw God, and was not destroyed. . There are several examples of theophany in the Hebrew scripture, but they are clouded and distant. No one talks to the divine directly, no one wrestles with him literally. They see Him as fire in the sky like Elijah or through a burning bush, like Moses. was not destroyed like Moses would have been. As well, Moses and Elijah saw Jacob in the daytime. There was none of the retreating night and emerging day that mark similar passages.
Bringing this back to the text itself, it might be useful to be reminded that we do not know, that the passage might be about not knowing itself, and the desire to limn it works functionally against what is on the page. This assumption is made explicitly clear by Robert Alter in his notes on the translation of the 5 books of Genesis: “he initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob's point of view and so all he knows of him in what he sees, that he is a man.”
This spirit of plain common sense and textual closeness marks an attitude we should take, that the desire for answers does not exist, and the text should be trusted itself. That the person he wrestled with could have been any number of people, but what exactly did the wrestling mean. The first meaning of the wrestling might connect with the second half of the Torah Commentaries narrative. They brought up the possibility that it was Jacob wrestling with himself, and the second half of that commentary is full of the same kind of plain narrative sense: “We can imagine Jacob saying to himself, "Until now, I have responded to difficult situations by lying and running, I deceived my father. I ran away from Esau. I left Laban's house stealthily instead of confronting him. I hate myself for being a person who lies and runs. But I'm afraid of facing up to this situation" By not defeating his conscience, Jacob wins. He outgrows his Jacob identity as the trickster and becomes Israel, t he one who contends with God and people instead of avoiding or manipulating them., At the end of the struggle, he is physically wounded and emotionally depleted. Nevertheless the Torah describes him (in 33:18) as Shalem, translated safe, with connotations of "whole", at peace with himself (shalem is related to the word shalom", possessing an integrity he never had before. " (s'fat emet) Rashbam sees God as sending an angel to wrestle with Jacob to prevent him from running away as he may have been tempted to do, compelling him to do the right thing. And B. Jacob writes" God answers a person's prayers if the person prays by searching himself, becoming his own opponent"
This paradox, the breaking of Jacob to make him whole or striving with the divine in order to become the father of nations girds other discussions of this word and this text. The Torah suggests that there is a punishment aspect of this, that the wrestling is because of God's desire to change Jacob, but Jacob never really changes. His name, and his behaviour does not engage in the radical split that a cosmic struggle like this one would assume that a radical change in behaviour. The one argument against the story being about moral change is this lack of change. The New Jerome makes this commentary explicit: “...Many Suggest that God responds to Jacobs history of deception; the story constitutions a disciplinary move on God's part to teach Jacob that he cannot proceed in to the future relying on his own devices. Hence, some claim the story presents Jacobs conversion to a life more attuned to the ways of God. Yet, we find no evidence of that in the narrative--no negative judgment of Jacob's behaviors, no repentance on Jacob’s part and no fundamental change in Jacob’s subsequent life pattern. Indeed, in giving Jacob a new name, God commends Jacob for struggling and names him in view of who he has been in the past, and given his response to the divine challenge, still is. (New Jerome, 34).
The wrestling with Jacob then, might be something that he does, something that is the core to his personality. He strives with God, with the divine throughout his relationship with the divine. Alter talks about this: “The image of wrestling has been implicit throughout the Jacob story; in his rolling away the huge stone from the mouth of the well, and in his multiple contending s with LAban. Now in this culminating moment of his life story, the charactering image of wresting is made explicit and literal. (Alter, 179) . The wrestling then marks Jacob's life, his desires and his relationship with t he divine. He becomes a trickster figure, whose role is one of manipulation and trickery. That the wrestling is a draw and that no one wins or loses also indicates that there is no moralism. Jacob wrestles to name his opponent, and to get his blessing. But his blessing does not come from the usual sources—he got his first blessing via trickery, nd his second blessing does not emerge from any real known tradition. There is nothing patriarchal, and really nothing in the Hebrew tradition that would mark this as from the rest of the hebrew scripture. All we have is a continued and almost seemingly cryptic permanence. We still wonder why he wrestles, and what exactly the blessing could contain function as still operational questions.
We then ask the next obvious question, what does the blessing consist of. Usually in Hebrew blessings, the word suggests a radical change in personality—like what occurs from Abraham when he moves from Abram, or from Sara to Sarah. We have already maintained that Jacob's first blessing comes from chicanery, and the second blessing comes from a figure who actually might not be YHWH, that might be demonic. That his name is Israel and not Israyah, also suggests ancient precedents—that this name change does not feature the suffix that was given to the nation that marks it as a unique people.
There are other components to the blessing, complications and implications that mark the naming. Gerard Rad in his commentary to Genesis talks about some of these implications: “the late Jewish midrash understands the demand to be released as follows: “I must sing in the morning choir before God's throne. Now one must assume that Jacob has discovered something of the divine nature of his appointment, for in an odd contrast to his previous defense, he struggles to wrest a blessing from him, viz. divine vitality. It is better not to explain this as an especially pious quality; it is more correct to encounter with God. This clutching at God and his power of blessing is so elemental that it goes beyond what we understand by piety or impiety. This request for knowledge is not granted at all. Rather Jacob must first be asked who follows one must bear in mind that the ancients did not consider a name as simply sound and smoke. On, the contrary, for them the name was linked with the bearer with such a way that the name contrived something of the character of the one who bore it. “
Even with the suspicion that the wrestling figure is not YWHW , there is a definite tying into the blessing with the renaming. The blessing itselgf maybe the renaming, but the renaming does not stick, there is not a permanence that comes from other blessings to other patriarchs. The begging, the clasping and the gathering are fundamental to the Jacob story.
The important bit from Rad though, is that the language transcends and escapes from traditional ideas of piety. The ancient nature of the text betrays any attempts to work through the religious quality of the text afterwards. The blessing then, might not be the name change, or even calling him to be the father of nations, is a later inclusion, a priestly attempt to normalize and recontextualise an impossibly slippery text of a time that occurred before the lingusitic implications of the twelve tribes. Bayford talks about this naming, and it's closeness but not interconnectedness with the text. “The significance of the name , like the identity and function of Jacob's wrestling partner, is debated. The major problem is that its grammatical structure has no exact parallel among biblical names, and its trilateral root...is only found elsewhere in Hosea 12:4. (Bayford, 373)
If there is no piety, no religious lesson, to be found in the ancient desires that provide Jacob is onea bedrock of the story, and the change between what was named and what is named is ambiguous, then it is important for us to find out what the name Jacob meant, and what the name Israel means. Beginning with the name of Jacob. Alter describes the problem with this text best, when he describes other naming rituals in relation to Jacob: “Abraham's change of name was a mere rhetorical flourish compared to this one, for all of the patricahs Javos is one whose life is entangled in a moral ambiguties. Rashi beautifully catches the response of the name change: “It will no longer be said that the blessings came through deviousness (ooqbah, a word suggested by the radical of “crookedness” in the name Jacob but instead through lordliness (sarrah, a root that can be extracted from the name Isreal) and openess. It is nevertheless noteworthy—and to my knowledge has not been noted—that the pronouncement about the new name is not completely fulfilled. Whereas Abraham is invariably called Ab raham once the name is changed from Abram, the narrative continues to refer to this patriarch in most instances as Jacob. Thus, Israel does not really replace his name but becomes a synonym for it. A practice reflected in the parralleism of biblical poetry, where Jacob is always used in the first half of the line and Israel, the poetic varation, in the second half...(Alter, 181). This poetic parallelism is noted especially in verse 27, where the referent keeps jumping around, is the reference to Jacob, to Israel, to that who is wrestled, or that who wrestles—that who strives, and that who is crooked merge in a muscularly linguistic struggle with that who is being wrestled. Even when the struggle breaks, even in the breaking the language of the naming and the blessing that Jacob begs so ardently for never truly leaves.
The name Isreal is equally confusing, equally slippery. The New Interpretaters commentary spends some time figuring out exactly what the meaning of struggle found in the text: “although Israel may actually mean something like “God rules, the narrator claims otherwise. The NRSV footnote s suggest a purposeful ambiguity in the name: “God Strives” (God intintes and engages in the wrestling, and “the one who strives with God” (Jacob responds in kind. Jacob cannot struggle with God if God refuses to be so engaged. God's giving this name, then has implications for God as well as for Jacob. It affirms a divine commitment to stay with Jacob in this struggle.” If this is the case, if this becomes a verb, that moves throughout the Gospel, and talks about how the divine breaks us, it provides a kind of narrative outside of the text—it provides at least one way out of the text, a way that can be explained using the last three words: daybreak, hip, and Penuel.
The hip, the brokenness of the hip and how that brokenness extends to a new kind of freeing strangness is one of the metaphors that Rad uses to complicate, but also liberate this passage. The text is written on Jacob's body, and for Rad: “By the time of the Yahwhist many interpertations of the story had been made, and that it had become quite broken in the traditon. But precisely because of its breaks and joints it received it's essential spaciousness; preciously the looseness in the inner d every connection of the statements to one another makes room for many ideas, for the indvidiual proceedings and words in the evenet, as every expositer sees are not prescily limited with respsecft to their meaning and their significance. And every exgente will likewise encounter something somewhere in this narrative which can no longer be interpreted. (Rad, 319)
The breaking of the body, the striking of the hip, is the crux of the entire story, and the one that suggests that the text itself is broken, as Rad suggests. The strugge mle between the man and between Jacob lasted for a very long time. It was eternal, and it was if the firmament had broken from the sky itself. That he needs the blessing adds to the desperatio of the story. The wrestling portion is a place where both Gunkel and Rad notice a tension in the text itself, a breaking apart of the story. (verse 25). It becomes almost meta-contextual, the wrestling of the angel, the wrestling of Jacob, the wrestling of history, and the wrestling of the reader.
The reader becomes Jacob and Jacob becomes us. Rad describes the darkness of the text: “the struggle was indecisive for a long peroid, until the mysterious antagoist touched Jacob's hip, which was put out of joint by the touch, as though by a magical power. Here is a passage where a much older form of our saga is revealed. The words in v. 25 are so strangely unrelated that one might think at first, in view of the hopelessness of the fight that Jacob had won the upper hand of his antoginist through a trick of fighting. This interperation would best suit the contiuation in versuis 26, where the antognist asks Jacob to let him go, and then also the later statement that Jacob had prevailed. (Rad. 316)
What exactly did Jacob prevail over? It might have been the history of Isreal, over his enemies, over itself, and its polytheistic history. Rad talks a bit about this, continuing on in his history: “the notation conceals an earlier etiology of a cultic dance, eg a lamping dance. (Cf 1 Kings 18:26) It can no longer be decided. It is further reported that the Israelites reverently rememd this crippling of their ancestry in a very curious cultic usage connected with their slaughter pf animals. Of all the things which happened on that night when the name Israel was recoded, this crippling of the ancestor become the subject of an especially nurtured memory...(Rad, 319)
In this case then Jacob becomes like Isaac, who is bundled by Abraham to a cultic mountain, and is almost sacrificed as a reminder that unlike their neighbours, they no longer sacrifice children. But in this context, they once did, and they once worried about what their pagan, polytheistic neighbours thought. The uniqueness of this text then, is how it attempts over and over again to make Hebrew that which is weirdly isolated from that context. The last two words, one a time and one a place, are like putting cement blocks in an attempt to weed a garden. The weeds push forth and the cement breaks. The text emerges as one of continued instability.
The time is daybreak, which has emerged in the narrative when talking about Taylor's idea that the wrestler was the face of God, and that Jacob is moving on the face of God itself, in Gunkel's discussion of the night deity that loses power during the day, and in the Torah commentaries discussion of Jacob's dark night of the soul, But there is greater power in it elsewhere. There is an element of the story that argues that Jacob's adversary loses power as the night emerges into day break, but it is almost as if that whom Jacob wrestles is night itself. The darkness and the light then become poetic elements for Jacob's personal, family, and collective history. The darkness is not only a personal dark night of the soul, but a collective social and poltical one as well.
Alter makes this argument explicit: “But the real point, as Jacob's adversary himself suggests when he refuses to reveal his name, is that he resists identification. Appearing to Jacob , he is the embodiment of portentous antagonism in Jacob;'s dark night of the soul. He is obviously in some sense a double of Esau as adversary but he is also a doubling of all with whom Jacob has had to contend and he may equally well be an externalization of all that Jacob has to wrestle with within himself. A powerful physical metaphor is nitmatied by the story of wrestling: Jacob, whose name can be construed as "he who acts crookedly" is been, permanently lamed, by his nameless adversary in order to be made straight before his reunion with Esau (Alter, 180) .
While Jacob might have been made straight morally, while his trickster ways may have been replaced with a blessing of great ambiguity and shadowy power, and that blessing would result in an emergence of a new kind of power, he is still broken or crooked in his body. Seeing the face of the supernatural results in a body that cannot be sacrificed. To limp and to be lame has a negative power in the ancient world. A blemished animal cannot be placed upon the alter, but Jacob with his limp that comes from struggling can now lead his people. The paradox there, a paradox that remains ungaurded, is central to this story.
The paradox continues in where the wrestling took place, and this becomes the last element, before a conclusion. The wrestling took place at a place called Pienel. Note the el suffix, and how it is like Israel the person, and Bethel, the place where Jacob had his first vision. Pienel means the face of God, and has we have talked about before, el being an old name for God, Elohim not fully attaching itself to YHWH but having a gap or a disconnect. In verse 21, just before the narrative of wrestling, there are 5 references to various faces in a little over 4 lines. The name becomes a place loaded with psycholinguistic baggage. It also ends the tale, finishing after the strange priestly verse, the verse that seems disconnected. The place becomes a way to acknowledge the texts liminal working from a historical basis to a new future for the Isrealites.
The Torch Bible commentaries place all of this naming in a proper context: “yet this story is told with a quite remarkable economy of language and is quite unforgettable. WE note that the story is linked with a place-name which by its very form suggests an ancient cult center. It is also linked with a dietary law (which is not otherwise mentioned in the Law, a taboo on eating the sciatic muscle. Thirdly it is related to the giving to Jacob of a new name, Israel which is, to our mind, most unnaturally interpreted, Again the word for Wrestle is nowhere else used in the bible and has obviously been chosen for its similarity in sound to Jabbok. Although this must not be pressed too far, the supernatural antagonist is not described as Yahweh, and if the name Israel and Peniel are a guide, it is at El, a Canaanite god. Lastly the location is important, it is at the crossing of the river, the threshold of the land of Canaan, and in popular thought, thresholds were always dangerous to those who crossed for the first time. All this suggests that we have here a very ancient story which, because it had so strong a hold on the imagination, was particularly valuable for interpretation and reinterpretation. In its final form in the book of Genesis, it at least points to the fact that Jacob is entering the new land, the land of promise..."
Peinel then, becomes a mark of the continued history, a refusal to forgot and a desire to keep a place firm in the history of a people who were nomadic, whose only contuinued narrative they had was the history, was an oral tradition that worked multiple attempts in a single way.
That the story ends with a new kind of dietary restriction, and also ends in a geographic place that had not only ancient history but a profound kind of collective history allows for the Israelites to acknowledge or at least find a way to live with their ancient past. The passage pockmarked with forgettings, and refusals, seems to me an attempt to break through, to contextualise and to remmemebr their history. The wrestling, the breaking, the impurity, and the making pure but not whole are all new ways of functioning, new ways of finding a way to become this new kind of category set.
The passage then is an argument against seeking of answers. It becomes a way to live in our uncomfortable collective histories, and to acknowledge them to move forward. It becomes a way, in it's full and complete understanding to spend time with the mystery. We do not know who we are struggling with, we do not know why our bodies are broken, we do not know what we are begging for, and when we finally receive the gift of blessing, it does not often come in a form or even a lingustic context we are expecting. We grapple in the dark with dangerous strangers, who may be compoenets of ourselves and our history, alone and naked before a power that might be beneveolent or might be malovent, but is never simple, is never ready. We tell the story of this struggling, but the narrative we have is frequently in the dark, as dark as that night was. We do this, not because we want to or feel called or even because we seek wholeness or completion, but because there is not another option, not another way of seeing Pienel, or the face of God. When we finish the wrestling, when we get the blessing of a new name, we do not lose our old name. The naming becomes a way to move between old and new, between what was and what will become. In this capacity, We are Jacob, and Jacob is us.