Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers

Clifton Snider

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Although not many Christians know the answer to this question, the Bible is quite clear regarding the identity of the individual.

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Unfortunately, too many believers ignore the Old Testament other than for a few favorite 'tales' — David versus Goliath, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel , and so on. Not too many people have taken the time to understand the real truth contained in God's word, especially concerning the patriarchs like Jacob. Jacob was the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. The story begins with him traveling from his home to that of his mother's brother, Laban, to find a wife.

Although he sought to marry only one woman, he ended up with two wives, as Laban tricked him into marrying his oldest daughter, Leah, when he actually meant to marry her younger sister Rachel. After working for Laban seven 7 years for each woman, he decides to return to the home of his father Isaac. Jacob, on the way back, sends his sons and wives across the ford a shallow area where one could cross without too much difficulty in the river Jabbok but he remained alone on the other side.

Then, the Bible says, some seemingly unknown person began to wrestle with him all night long. And Jacob was left alone. And a Man wrestled there with him until the breaking of the day. After Isaac sent Jacob away to find a wife, Esau realized his own Canaanite wives were evil in his father's eyes and so he took a daughter of Isaac's half-brother, Ishmael , as another wife.

Near Luz en route to Haran , Jacob experienced a vision of a ladder, or staircase, reaching into heaven with angels going up and down it, commonly referred to as " Jacob's ladder. According to Midrash Genesis Rabbah , the ladder signified the exiles that the Jewish people would suffer before the coming of the Jewish Messiah: Jacob feared that his descendants would never be free of Esau's domination, but God assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would come falling down.

In the morning, Jacob awakened and continued on his way to Haran, after naming the place where he had spent the night " Bethel ," "God's house. Arriving in Haran, Jacob saw a well where shepherds were gathering their flocks to water them and met Laban 's younger daughter, Rachel , Jacob's first cousin ; she was working as a shepherdess.

He loved her immediately, and after spending a month with his relatives, asked for her hand in marriage in return for working seven years for Laban the Aramean. Laban agreed to the arrangement. These seven years seemed to Jacob "but a few days, for the love he had for her," but when they were complete and he asked for his wife, Laban deceived Jacob by switching Rachel for her older sister, Leah , as the veiled bride. In the morning, when the truth became known, Laban justified his action, saying that in his country it was unheard of to give a younger daughter before the older.

However, he agreed to give Rachel in marriage as well if Jacob would work another seven years. After the week of wedding celebrations with Leah, Jacob married Rachel, and he continued to work for Laban for another seven years. Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, and Leah felt hated.

God opened Leah's womb and she gave birth to four sons rapidly: Reuben , Simeon , Levi , and Judah. Rachel, however, remained barren. Following the example of Sarah, who gave her handmaid to Abraham after years of infertility, Rachel gave Jacob her handmaid, Bilhah , in marriage so that Rachel could raise children through her. Bilhah gave birth to Dan and Naphtali. Seeing that she had left off childbearing temporarily, Leah then gave her handmaid Zilpah to Jacob in marriage so that Leah could raise more children through her.

Zilpah gave birth to Gad and Asher. Afterwards, Leah became fertile again and gave birth to Issachar , Zebulun , and Dinah , Jacob's first and only daughter. God remembered Rachel, who gave birth to Joseph and Benjamin. If pregnancies of different marriages overlapped, the first twelve births all the sons except Benjamin, and the daughter Dinah could have occurred within seven years. That is one obvious, but not universally held, interpretation of Genesis After Joseph was born, Jacob decided to return home to his parents.

Laban the Aramean was reluctant to release him, as God had blessed his flock on account of Jacob. Laban asked what he could pay Jacob. Jacob suggested that all the spotted, speckled, and brown goats and sheep of Laban's flock, at any given moment, would be his wages. Jacob placed rods of poplar, hazel, and chestnut, all of which he peeled "white streaks upon them," [14] within the flocks' watering holes or troughs in a performance of sympathetic magic , associating the stripes of the rods with the growth of stripes on the livestock.

The angel of the Lord , in a dream back during the breeding season, told Jacob "Now lift your eyes and see [that] all the he goats mounting the animals are ringed, speckled, and striped, for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you", [17] that he is the God whom Jacob met at Bethel, [18] and that Jacob should leave and go back to the land where he was born, [19] which he and his wives and children did without informing Laban.

Before they left, Rachel stole the teraphim , considered to be household idols, from Laban's house. Laban pursued Jacob for seven days.

The night before he caught up to him, God appeared to Laban in a dream and warned him not to say anything good or bad to Jacob. Knowing nothing about Rachel's theft, Jacob told Laban that whoever stole them should die and stood aside to let him search. When Laban reached Rachel's tent, she hid the teraphim by sitting on them and stating she could not get up because she was menstruating.

Jacob and Laban then parted from each other with a pact to preserve the peace between them. Laban returned to his home and Jacob continued on his way. As Jacob neared the land of Canaan, he sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau. They returned with the news that Esau was coming to meet Jacob with an army of men. With great apprehension, Jacob prepared for the worst.

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He engaged in earnest prayer to God, then sent on before him a tribute of flocks and herds to Esau, "A present to my lord Esau from thy servant Jacob. Jacob then transported his family and flocks across the ford Jabbok by night, then recrossed back to send over his possessions, being left alone in communion with God.

There, a mysterious being appeared "man," Genesis Because of this, "to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket" Genesis This incident is the source of the mitzvah of porging. Jacob then demanded a blessing, and the being declared in Genesis Jacob asked the being's name, but he refused to answer.

Josephus uses only the terms "angel", "divine angel," and "angel of God," describing the struggle as no small victory. According to Rashi, the being was the guardian angel of Esau himself, sent to destroy Jacob before he could return to the land of Canaan. Trachtenberg theorized that the being refused to identify itself for fear that, if its secret name was known, it would be conjurable by incantations. Morris say that the stranger was "God Himself and, therefore, Christ in His preincarnate state", citing Jacob's own evaluation and the name he assumed thereafter, "one who fights victoriously with God", and adding that God had appeared in the human form of the Angel of the Lord to eat a meal with Abraham in Genesis In the morning, Jacob assembled his four wives and 11 sons, placing the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear.

Some commentators cite this placement as proof that Jacob continued to favor Joseph over Leah's children, as presumably the rear position would have been safer from a frontal assault by Esau, which Jacob feared. Jacob himself took the foremost position. Esau's spirit of revenge, however, was apparently appeased by Jacob's bounteous gifts of camels, goats and flocks.

Their reunion was an emotional one. Esau offered to accompany them on their way back to Israel, but Jacob protested that his children were still young and tender born six to 13 years prior in the narrative ; Jacob suggested eventually catching up with Esau at Mount Seir. According to the Sages, this was a prophetic reference to the End of Days, when Jacob's descendants will come to Mount Seir, the home of Edom, to deliver judgment against Esau's descendants for persecuting them throughout the millennia see Obadiah 1: Jacob actually diverted himself to Succoth and was not recorded as rejoining Esau until, at Machpelah , the two bury their father Isaac, who lived to be , and was 60 years older than they were.

Jacob then arrived in Shechem , where he bought a parcel of land, now identified as Joseph's Tomb. In Shechem, Jacob's daughter Dinah was kidnapped and raped by the ruler's son, who desired to marry the girl. Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, agreed in Jacob's name to permit the marriage as long as all the men of Shechem first circumcised themselves, ostensibly to unite the children of Jacob in Abraham's covenant of familial harmony. On the third day after the circumcisions, when all the men of Shechem were still in pain, Simeon and Levi put them all to death by the sword and rescued their sister Dinah, and their brothers plundered the property, women, and children.

Jacob condemned this act, saying: Jacob returned to Bethel, where he had another vision of blessing. According to the Midrash, [28] the plural form of the word "weeping" indicates the double sorrow that Rebecca also died at this time. Jacob then made a further move while Rachel was pregnant; near Bethlehem , Rachel went into labor and died as she gave birth to her second son, Benjamin Jacob's twelfth son.

Jacob buried her and erected a monument over her grave. Rachel's Tomb , just outside Bethlehem, remains a popular site for pilgrimages and prayers to this day. Jacob then settled in Migdal Eder , where his firstborn, Reuben, slept with Rachel's servant Bilhah; Jacob's response was not given at the time, but he did condemn Reuben for it later, in his deathbed blessing. Jacob was finally reunited with his father Isaac in Mamre outside Hebron. When Isaac died at the age of , Jacob and Esau buried him in the Cave of the Patriarchs , which Abraham had purchased as a family burial plot.

At this point in the biblical narrative, two genealogies of Esau's family appear under the headings "the generations of Esau". A conservative interpretation is that, at Isaac's burial, Jacob obtained the records of Esau, who had been married 80 years prior, and incorporated them into his own family records, and that Moses augmented and published them.

The house of Jacob dwelt in Hebron , [30] in the land of Canaan. His flocks were often fed in the pastures of Shechem [31] [32] as well as Dothan. When Joseph was 17 years old, Jacob made a long coat or tunic of many colors for him. Seeing this, the half brothers began to hate Joseph. Then Joseph began to have dreams that implied that his family would bow down to him.

When he told his brothers about such dreams, it drove them to conspire against him. When Jacob heard of these dreams, he rebuked his son for proposing the idea that the house of Jacob would even bow down to Joseph. Sometime afterward, the sons of Jacob by Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, were feeding his flocks in Shechem. Jacob wanted to know how things were doing, so he asked Joseph to go down there and return with a report. Later that day, the report that Jacob ended up receiving came from Joseph's brothers who brought before him a coat laden with blood.

Jacob identified the coat as the one he made for Joseph. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces. No one from the house of Jacob could comfort him during this time of bereavement. The truth was, Joseph's older brothers had turned on him, apprehended him and ultimately sold into slavery on a caravan headed for Egypt. Twenty years later, [35] throughout the Middle East a severe famine occurred like none other that lasted seven years.

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In the second year of this great famine, [38] when Israel Jacob was about years old, [39] he told his 10 sons of Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, to go to Egypt and buy grain. The brothers work together, farming land and raising cattle. One day, Anpu's wife attempts to seduce Bata. When he strongly rejects her advances, the wife tells her husband that his brother attempted to seduce her and beat her when she refused.

In response to this, Anpu attempts to kill Bata, who flees and prays to Re-Harakhti to save him. The god creates a crocodile-infested lake between the two brothers, across which Bata is finally able to appeal to his brother and share his side of the events. To emphasize his sincerity, Bata severs his genitalia and throws them into the water, where a catfish eats them.

Bata states that he is going to the Valley of the Cedar , where he will place his heart on the top of the blossom of a cedar tree, so that if it is cut down Anpu will be able to find it and allow Bata to become alive again. Bata tells Anpu that if he is ever given a jar of beer that froths, he should know to seek out his brother. After hearing of his brother's plan, Anpu returns home and kills his wife. Meanwhile, Bata is establishing a life in the Valley of the Cedar, building a new home for himself.

Bata comes upon the Ennead , or the principal Egyptian deities, who take pity on him.

Khnum , the god frequently depicted in Egyptian mythology as having fashioned humans on a potters' wheel, creates a wife for Bata. Because of her divine creation, Bata's wife is sought after by the pharaoh. When the pharaoh succeeds in bringing her to live with him, she tells him to cut down the tree in which Bata has put his heart. They do so, and Bata dies. Anpu then receives a frothy jar of beer and sets off to the Valley of the Cedar. He searches for his brother's heart for more than three years, finding it at the beginning of the fourth year.

He follows Bata's instructions and puts the heart in a bowl of cold water. As predicted, Bata is resurrected.

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