The Bible

The Bible › Genesis

Genesis 32

1Jacob went on his way, and God's messengers met him. 2When Jacob saw them, he said, “This is God's camp!” He named that place Mahanaim. 3Jacob sent messengers ahead of him to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the territory of Edom. 4He instructed them, “Say this to my lord Esau: ‘Your servant Jacob says: I have lived as a foreigner with Laban and stayed until now. 5I have cattle, donkeys, flocks, and male and female slaves. I have sent to tell my lord, so that I may find favor in your eyes.’” 6The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We went to your brother Esau. He is also coming to meet you, with four hundred men.” 7Jacob was deeply afraid and distressed. He divided the people with him, the flocks, the cattle, and the camels into two camps. 8He said, “If Esau comes to one camp and attacks it, the remaining camp will escape.”

9Jacob said, “God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, Yahweh, who said to me, ‘Return to your country and your kindred, and I will do you good,’ 10I am unworthy of all the steadfast kindness and all the faithfulness you have shown your servant. With only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. 11Please rescue me from my brother's hand, from Esau's hand. I am afraid of him, that he may come and strike me down, mother and children together. 12Yet you said, ‘I will surely do you good and make your seed like the sand of the sea, too numerous to count.’”

13He spent that night there and took from what he had a gift for his brother Esau: 14two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, 15thirty nursing camels with their young, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. 16He put them in his slaves' hands, each herd separately, and said to his slaves, “Go ahead of me and leave a space between one herd and the next.” 17He instructed the first, “When my brother Esau meets you and asks you, ‘Whose are you? Where are you going? And whose animals are these before you?’ 18say, ‘They belong to your servant Jacob. They are a gift sent to my lord Esau. Look, he too is behind us.’” 19He instructed the second, the third, and everyone following the herds in the same way: “Say these same words to Esau when you meet him. 20Also say, ‘Look, your servant Jacob is behind us.’” For he said, “I will appease his face with the gift going ahead of me. After that I will see his face; perhaps he will lift up my face.” 21So the gift went ahead of him, but he spent that night in the camp.

22That night he rose and took his two wives, his two slave women, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23He took them and sent them across the stream, and sent across everything he had. 24Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25When the man saw that he could not prevail against him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip. Jacob's hip socket was dislocated as he wrestled with him. 26He said, “Let me go, because dawn has risen.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” 28He said, “Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” 29Jacob asked, “Please tell me your name.” He said, “Why do you ask my name?” And he blessed him there. 30Jacob named the place Peniel, “because I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been rescued.” 31The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, and he was limping because of his hip. 32That is why, to this day, the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew of the hip that is over the hip socket, because he touched Jacob's hip socket at that sinew.

Translation notes 6

32:1–3 — Messengers. The same Hebrew word describes God's messengers and Jacob's human envoys. Mahanaim means “two camps,” an expression also central to Jacob's preparations.

32:20 — Face. The Hebrew repeatedly uses “face”: appeasing Esau's face, seeing his face, and hoping Esau will lift Jacob's face, meaning accept him. The repetition leads into Jacob's encounter at Peniel and his words to Esau in 33:10.

32:22 — Eleven children. The Hebrew uses the general word for children. Eleven corresponds to the number of sons before Benjamin's birth, but Dinah has also already been named. The narrative does not explain her relation to this count; the draft keeps both the word and number without resolving the difficulty.

32:24–30 — The wrestler. The narrator initially calls the figure “a man.” The encounter later involves struggling with God and Jacob's claim to have seen God. Those descriptions are retained in their sequence without assigning the figure a more specific identity in the translation.

32:28 — Israel. The explanation links Israel's name with the verb “struggle.” The name itself is commonly understood as “God struggles” or “God rules”; the passage's wordplay does not require every part of the name to have the same grammatical role as the sentence explaining it.

32:30–32 — Peniel and the hip. Peniel means “face of God”; Penuel is another form of the same name. The precise anatomical identification of the sinew is uncertain, though it is traditionally identified with the sciatic nerve. Hebrew verse numbers throughout this chapter are one higher than the numbers used here.