However, after losing to God in a wrestling match, Jacob received God’s blessings and a new name – Israel. (b) "to follow with evil intent," "to supplant" or in general "to deceive" (so (c) "to follow with good intent," whether as a slave (compare our English "to heel," of a dog) for service, or as a guard for protection, hence, "to guard" (so in Ethiopic), "to keep guard over", and thus "to restrain" (so (d) "to follow," "to succeed," "to take the place of another" (so Arabic, and the Hebrew noun 'eqebh, "consequence," "recompense," whether of reward or punishment). Jacob therefore represents the first generation of those who are determinately separate from their environment.

In return for 20 years of service, Jacob tricked Laban into giving him his desired choice of wages - speckled and spotted sheep and goats - by stripping back the branches of poplar, almond, and plane trees and placing them at the watering troughs where the strongest animals came to drink and mate ( And this too may justly be claimed as a climax in Jacob's development. the sketch is evidently true to life, both from its objectivity and from its coherence. "The material here is not mythical, but national; therefore clearer (namely, than in This general view, which when carried to its extreme implications (as by Steuernagel, Die Einwanderung der israelitischen Stamme in Kanaan, 1901) comes perilously near the reductio ad absurdum that is its own refutation, has been rejected by that whole group of critics, who, following Noldeke, see in Jacob, as in so many others of the patriarchs, an original deity (myth), first abased to the grade of a hero (heroic legend), and at last degraded to the level of a clown (tales of jest or marvel). His motive in going, however, is represented as being fundamentally the desire to terminate an absence from his father's country that had already grown too long ( After Laban, Esau. Yet even those writers who admit the broad outlines of a residence of the tribes in Egypt, an exodus of some sort, and a founder of the nation named Moses, are for the most part skeptical of this cycle of family figures and fortunes in a remote age, with its nomads wandering between Mesopotamia and Canaan. neither Deity nor humanity has prevailed against Jacob ( Throughout the entire story of Jacob, therefore, his relations with Yahweh his God, after they were once established ( His Divinity--that is to say, those attributes in which His Divinity manifested itself in His dealings with Jacob.

Starting with such a combination of natural endowments, social, practical, ethical, Jacob passed through a course of Divine tuition, which, by building upon some of them, repressing others and transfiguring the remainder, issued in the triumph of grace over nature, in the transformation of a Jacob into an Israel. Abraham and his household were immigrants in Canaan; Jacob and Esau were natives of Canaan in the second generation, yet had not a drop of Canaanitish blood in their veins. This tuition has been well analyzed by a recent writer (Thomas, Genesis, III, 204 f) into the school of sorrow, the school of providence and the school of grace. Yet between them lies the pledge of Divine presence and protection in the vision of God's host at Mahanaim: And second, he was capable of progress in these matters; that is, his reaction to the Divine tuition would appear, if charted, as a series of elevations, separated one from another, to be sure, by low levels and deep declines, yet each one higher than the last, and all taken collectively lifting the whole average up and up, till in the end faith has triumphed over sight, the future over present good, a yet unpossessed but Divinely promised Canaan over all the comfort and honors of Egypt, and the aged patriarch lives only to "wait for Yahweh's salvation" ( The contrast of Jacob with Esau furnishes perhaps the best means of grasping the significance of these two facts for an estimate of Jacob's attitude toward the promise. While thus engaged, there appeared one in the form of a man who wrestled with him. What the revelation of the host of God had not sufficed to teach this faithless, anxious, scheming patriarch, that God sought to teach him in the night-struggle, with its ineffaceable physical memorial of a human impotence that can compass no more than to cling to Divine omnipotence ( Before Jacob's arrival in the South of Canaan where his father yet lived and where his own youth had been spent, he passed through a period of wandering in Central Palestine, somewhat similar to that narrated of his grandfather Abraham.