Jacob Wrestles with God at Peniel and Is Reconciled with Esau

The event

After twenty years, Jacob leaves Laban's household — richer, but still, at heart, the same man who once fled his brother's anger, and now has to face it again. Word reaches him that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men, and Jacob is "greatly afraid and distressed." He sends ahead waves of gifts, divides his camp for safety, and prays one of the most honest, desperate prayers in Genesis, openly admitting he is "not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love" God has shown him.

That night, alone at the ford of the Jabbok, "a man" wrestles with Jacob until daybreak. When the man cannot prevail, he touches Jacob's hip socket and wrenches it, yet Jacob still won't let go without a blessing. The man asks his name — Jacob, "deceiver" — and renames him on the spot: "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." Jacob names the place Peniel, "face of God," astonished that he has seen God face to face and lived.

He limps out to meet Esau the next morning, bowing to the ground seven times — and instead of the vengeance he feared, Esau runs to him, embraces him, falls on his neck, and weeps. "I have enough, my brother," Esau says, refusing at first even to keep Jacob's gifts. Twenty years of guilt and dread dissolve in a single reunion, and the two brothers part peacefully, each going his own way — Jacob toward Canaan, Esau back toward Seir, the territory that will become Edom.

Dating

Placed at the end of Jacob's stated 20 years with Laban (Genesis 31:38, 41), counting back from his return to Canaan.

Scripture references

• Genesis 32:1-32
• Genesis 33:1-17
• Hosea 12:3-4