1. The verse numbering reflects the conventional division used in Hebrew Bibles. The King James Version, followed by some modern English Bibles, places the first verse here as a fifty-fifth verse in chapter 31, and then has verses 1–32 corresponding to verses 2–33 in the present version.

2. messengers of God accosted him. There is a marked narrative symmetry between Jacob’s departure from Canaan, when he had his dream of angels at Bethel, and his return, when again he encounters a company of angels. That symmetry will be unsettled when later in the chapter he finds himself in fateful conflict with a single divine being.

God’s camp . . . Mahanaim. The Hebrew for “camp” is maḥaneh. Mahanaim is the same word with a dual suffix and thus means twin camps, a signification that will be played out in a second narrative etymology when Jacob divides his family and flocks into two camps. The entire episode is notable for its dense exploitation of what Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig called Leitwortstil, key-word style. J. P. Fokkelman (1975) has provided particularly helpful commentary on this aspect of our text. The crucial repeated terms are maḥaneh, “camp,” which is played against minḥah, “tribute”; panim, “face,” which recurs not only as a noun but also as a component of the reiterated preposition “before,” a word that can be etymologically broken down in the Hebrew as “to the face of”; and ʿavar, “cross over” (in one instance here, the translation, yielding to the requirements of context, renders this as “pass”).

4. Jacob sent messengers before him. These are of course human messengers, but, in keeping with a common principle of composition in biblical narrative, the repetition of the term effects a linkage with the immediately preceding episode, in which the messengers, malʾakhim, are angels.

5. Thus shall you say. The syntactic division indicated by the cantillation markings in the Masoretic Text is: “Thus shall you say to my lord Esau.” But E. A. Speiser has convincingly demonstrated that “To my lord Esau, thus says your servant Jacob,” precisely follows the formula for the salutation or heading in ancient Near Eastern letters and so must be part of the text of the message.

my lord Esau . . . your servant Jacob. The narrator had referred to Esau as Jacob’s “brother,” as will the messengers. An elaborate irony of terms underlies the entire reunion of the twins: Jacob, destined by prenatal oracle and paternal blessing to be overlord to his brother, who is to be subject (ʿeved) to him, repeatedly designates himself ʿeved and his brother, lord (ʾadon). The formulas of deferential address of ancient Hebrew usage are thus made to serve a complex thematic end.

7. he is actually coming . . . and four hundred men are with him. There is no verbal response from Esau, who has by now established himself as a potentate in the trans-Jordanian region of Edom, but the rapid approach with four hundred men looks ominous, especially since that is a standard number for a regiment or raiding party, as several military episodes in 1 and 2 Samuel indicate.

8. two camps. A law of binary division runs through the whole Jacob story: twin brothers struggling over a blessing that cannot be halved, two sisters struggling over a husband’s love, flocks divided into unicolored and particolored animals, Jacob’s material blessing now divided into two camps.

10. and I will deal well with you. The first part of the sentence is in fact a direct quotation of God’s words to Jacob in 31:3 deleting “of your fathers.” But for God’s general reassurance, “I will be with you,” Jacob, in keeping with his stance as bargainer (who at Bethel stipulated that God must provide him food and clothing) substitutes a verb that suggests material bounty.

14. a tribute. The Hebrew minḥah also means “gift” (and, in cultic contexts, “sacrifice”), but it has the technical sense of a tribute paid by a subject people to its overlord, and everything about the narrative circumstances of this “gift” indicates it is conceived as the payment of a tribute. Note, for instance, the constellation of political terms in verse 19: “They are your servant Jacob’s, a tribute sent to my lord Esau.”

21. Let me placate him with the tribute that goes before me, and after I shall look on his face, perhaps he will show me a kindly face. The Hebrew actually has “face” four times in this brief speech. “Placate” is literally “cover over his face” (presumably, angry face); and “before me” can be broken down as “to my face.” To “look on his face” is a locution generally used for entering the presence of royalty; and “show me a kind face,” an idiom that denotes forgiveness, is literally “lift up my face” (presumably, my “fallen” or dejected face).

23. the Jabbok ford. The word for “ford,” maʿavar, is a noun derived from the reiterated verb ʿavar, “to cross over.” The Jabbok is a tributary of the Jordan running from east to west. Jacob has been traveling south from the high country of Gilead, Esau is heading north from Edom to meet him.

25. a man. The initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob’s point of view, and so all he knows of him is what he sees, that he is a “man.”

wrestled with him. The image of wrestling has been implicit throughout the Jacob story: in his grabbing Esau’s heel as he emerges from the womb, in his striving with Esau for birthright and blessing, in his rolling away the huge stone from the mouth of the well, and in his multiple contendings with Laban. Now, in this culminating moment of his life story, the characterizing image of wrestling is made explicit and literal.

26. he touched his hip socket. The inclination of modern translations to render the verb here as “struck” is unwarranted, being influenced either by the context or by the cognate noun negaʿ, which means “plague” or “affliction.” But the verb nagaʿ in the qal conjugation always means “to touch,” even “to barely touch,” and only in the piʿel conjugation can it mean “to afflict.” The adversary maims Jacob with a magic touch, or, if one prefers, by skillful pressure on a pressure point.

27. Let me go, for dawn is breaking. The folkloric character of this haunting episode becomes especially clear at this point. The notion of a night spirit that loses its power or is not permitted to go about in daylight is common to many folk traditions, as is the troll or guardian figure who blocks access to a ford or bridge. This temporal limitation of activity suggests that the “man” is certainly not God Himself and probably not an angel in the ordinary sense. It has led Claus Westermann to conclude that the nameless wrestler must be thought of as some sort of demon. Nahum Sarna, following the Midrash, flatly identifies the wrestler as the tutelary spirit (sar) of Esau. 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 in the dark of the night, before the morning when Esau will be reconciled with Jacob, he is the embodiment of portentous antagonism in Jacob’s dark night of the soul. He is obviously in some sense a doubling 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 intimated by the story of wrestling: Jacob, whose name can be construed as “he who acts crookedly,” is bent, permanently lamed, by his nameless adversary in order to be made straight before his reunion with Esau.

28. What is your name? Whatever the realm from which he comes, the stranger exercises no divine privilege of omniscience and must ask Jacob to tell him his name.

29. Not Jacob . . . but Israel. Abraham’s change of name was a mere rhetorical flourish compared to this one, for of all the patriarchs Jacob is the one whose life is entangled in moral ambiguities. Rashi beautifully catches the resonance of the name change: “It will no longer be said that the blessings came to you through deviousness [ʿoqbah, a word suggested by the radical of “crookedness” in the name Jacob] but instead through lordliness [serarah, a root that can be extracted from the name Israel] and openness.” 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 “Abraham” 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 parallelism of biblical poetry, where “Jacob” is always used in the first half of the line and “Israel,” the poetic variation, in the second half.

striven with God. The Hebrew term ʾelohim is a high concentration point of lexical ambiguity that serves the enigmatic character of the story very well. It is not the term that means “divine messenger” but it can refer to divine beings, whether or not it is prefixed by “sons of” (as in Genesis 6). It can also mean simply “God,” and in some contexts—could this be one?—it means “gods.” In a few cases, it also designates something like “princes” or “judges,” but that is precluded here by its being antithetically paired with “men.” It is not clear whether the anonymous adversary is referring to himself when he says ʾelohim or to more-than-human agents encountered by Jacob throughout his career. In any case, he etymologizes the name Yisraʾel, Israel, as “he strives with God.” In fact, names with the ʾel ending generally make God the subject, not the object, of the verb in the name. This particular verb, sarah, is a rare one, and there is some question about its meaning, though an educated guess about the original sense of the name would be: “God will rule,” or perhaps, “God will prevail.”

and won out. In almost all of his dealings, Jacob the bargainer, trader, wrestler, and heel-grabber has managed to win out. His winning out against the mysterious stranger consists in having fought to a kind of tie: the adversary has been unable to best him, and though he has hurt Jacob, he cannot break loose from Jacob’s grip.

31. Peniel. The name builds on “face-to-face” (panim ʾel panim), the “face” component being quite transparent in the Hebrew. In verse 32, Penuel is an alternate form of this name.

God. Again the term is ʾelohim, and there is no way of knowing whether it is singular or plural.

I came out alive. The Hebrew says literally: “My life [or, life-breath] was saved.”

32. And the sun rose upon him. There is another antithetical symmetry with the early part of the Jacob story, which has been nicely observed by Nahum Sarna: “Jacob’s ignominious flight from home was appropriately marked by the setting of the sun; fittingly, the radiance of the sun greets the patriarch as he crosses back into his native land.”

he was limping on his hip. The encounter with the unfathomable Other leaves a lasting mark on Jacob. This physical note resonates with the larger sense of a man’s life powerfully recorded in his story: experience exacts many prices, and he bears his inward scars as he lives onward—his memory of fleeing alone across the Jordan, his fear of the brother he has wronged, and, before long, his grief for the beloved wife he loses, and then, for the beloved son he thinks he has lost.

33. Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew. This concluding etiological notice is more than a mechanical reflex. For the first time, after the naming-story, the Hebrews are referred to as “the children of Israel,” and this dietary prohibition observed by the audience of the story “to this day” marks a direct identification with, or reverence for, the eponymous ancestor who wrestled through the night with a man who was no man.