Jacob
Gramps49
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
22-23 But during the night he got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He got them safely across the brook along with all his possessions.
24-25 But Jacob stayed behind by himself, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he couldn’t get the best of Jacob as they wrestled, he deliberately threw Jacob’s hip out of joint.
26 The man said, “Let me go; it’s daybreak.”
Jacob said, “I’m not letting you go ’til you bless me.”
27 The man said, “What’s your name?”
He answered, “Jacob.”
28 The man said, “But no longer. Your name is no longer Jacob. From now on it’s Israel (God-Wrestler); you’ve wrestled with God and you’ve come through.”
29 Jacob asked, “And what’s your name?”
The man said, “Why do you want to know my name?” And then, right then and there, he blessed him.
30 Jacob named the place Peniel (God’s Face) because, he said, “I saw God face-to-face and lived to tell the story!”
31-32 The sun came up as he left Peniel, limping because of his hip. (This is why Israelites to this day don’t eat the hip muscle; because Jacob’s hip was thrown out of joint.)
Genesis 32: 221-33 (The Message)
With whom or what is Jacob wrestling: a man, an angel, or with God, or an aspect of himself?
Comments
The New English Translation has the following footnote:
As an expression of Christian experience, of course, there is perhaps no better interpretation than in Charles Wesley's hymn: "Come, O thou traveller unknown......," though, perhaps, it is not relevant to this Kerygmania discussion.
I would argue that if you are able to throw someone's hip out of joint, you have got the best of the contest
To some extent I don't think it matters all that much, anything build too rigidly is on shakey ground, while most of the conclusions apply in any case. Whether the individual was 'physically' human, spiritual or divine they gave Jacob, God's message, renaming and blessing. And again if the physical struggle had been against god by proxy, I think that was representative of a deeper struggle. The NLT has "fought with God and men and won" (although I think the name only has a clear El component)
If you exclude verse 30, the bias would be vaguely towards the man side ("A man wrestled"), while verse 30 on the other hand seems to suggest Jacob saw the encounter as being very Godly. An angel, among other things, kind of imperfectly covers both.
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On the man side, there are many follow up questions, what drove him, to what extent was he under God's instruction/power.
On the godly side, god in carnal form raises questions. Do we go, 'that sounds like Jesus' (in any case we do already have Jesus), do we have some kind of presence. [Of the options it's the one I like most, and has that bit of support, but I like it because it's a big claim]
If angel, where does the face of god fit in, is the face some kind of title.
Seems to me that any and all of the above. That’s the beauty of Scripture, truth is multi faceted and layered, and can speak to the human condition of every generation in a meaningful way.
There is more at https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2389625/jewish/Jacob-Wrestles-With-the-Angel.htm
So some of the context of Genesis does strongly suggest the person may have been Yahweh.
And if there is anything about the Jewish religion that I appreciate is they are unafraid to struggle with God, But I am getting off on a tangent here.
But, what was the larger context? Why did he leave his family behind and when into the desert?
But that's not what it said. He couldn't get the best of him wrestling, so he cheated. It's as if I said, "We got into a fistfight to the death. When I saw I couldn't kill him, I pulled out my pistol and shot him." You wouldn't say, "Well clearly you could kill him." Or if you did, it would be silly.
It is what it said.
The hip is a freaking HARD joint to dislocate--even I with my connective tissue problems and multiple dislocations have never managed to dislocate that one. Think "we need a car crash" for this one.
That said, for the man/God/angel to do it with a single touch is basically cheating with divine power. So yeah, it's very like pulling an unexpected gun.
IMHO the hip dislocation made it clear to Jacob who he was wrestling with (I'm plumping for Jesus, here preincarnate); also made it clear that his opponent could have taken him out at any time but refrained; and gave him a lasting (ouch!) reminder of the struggle, which was as much a struggle of faith as it was of the body. Not a bad thing to have, on the whole, though post-dislocation pain sucks sucks SUCKS.
Jesus Jesus take no lip!
Jesus dislocate his hip!
Jesus!
Jesus!
Hooraaaaaayyyyy!
Have you ever done rational argumentation before?
It was probably pay back for a lot between Esau and Jacob. It is interesting that Jacob was on his way to Esau to offer him flocks and herds of valuable livestock to appease him after cheating him out of his father's blessing. Then he is told by his messengers that Esau was on his way with four hundred men and Jacob feared the worst. So he made plans to protect his family and at least part of his wealth.
Jacob had lived his life tricking and being tricked and it continued when he lived under Laban. God basically gave him a chance to get what he wanted (a blessing) in a straight forward but difficult way and and Jacob surprisingly prevailed by strength and determination. Of course, God had to get in the last lick. He is the Almighty, after all.
I think God wanted Jacob to change and stop living in fear. And Esau offered his forgiveness in the end without needing material equity.
(All of this is from my non-Biblically trained brain. A shot in the dark. Now you folks who actually have learned books on your shelves may carry on.
Nah. Most likely it's a narcissist who can't bear to lose. Unless your opponent climbed down from the clouds on a ladder, I think you are safe.
Lyda--you are mixing up two separate stories. Jacob's Ladder is in Genesis 23. It also appears to be from the Elohist tradition. The fight with the man through the night is in Genesis 32 and is from the Yahwist tradition.
There was no winking emoji to suggest it was a joke.
Sorry. I'll retreat now and leave the discussion to those who know what they are talking about.
As for Yahwist and Elohist traditions, I have serious doubts about those and don't do them. They are clearly not a necessity if nobody's thrown me out of Keryg yet.
I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts about that, @Lamb Chopped, though, obviously, only if you’ve the time and inclination.
I come at this with a couple of different foundations (? oh dear, that sounds wrong) that leave me the oddball in such discussions.
First of all, I've been a writer for about 35 years. I've written fiction and nonfiction, high academic prose and low advertising crap. I've written sermons and devotions, voice scripts, curricula, and the list goes on. And that gives me a view of texts from the creator's side that I suspect most biblical critics can't match.
I also hold a doctorate in English (Renaissance period specialty) which means I've been pretty well exposed to the lit crit theories of the past and present, from Aristotle on. And a helluva lot of that stuff has bled over into Bible criticism. (It's a freaking easy way to find a dissertation topic--just grab the Latest and Greatest lit crit theory--which probably hasn't jumped the genre fence into biblical criticism yet--and apply it to a book of your choice. Watch the critics applaud!)
Third, I'm a believer. Not from birth, I'm a convert, but I have seen the effects of the biblical text in my life and in other lives, and that inclines me to tread carefully. Rather like you'd do in a dynamite factory...
So.
(time to start a new post, methinks)
If I'm such a doofus, I suspect other writers can be, too. (and that includes oral composers--speakers?)
This has been an extremely minor example of something that somebody, some day, might use to try to show that the Lenten devotions for 2021 were written by three different authors. (Let's say they add to it the fact that the introductory verses are significantly longer in some cases, which just happen to (mostly) line up with cases where I wrote "Lord" in the prayer. Purely by chance. Or maybe not so purely, because word count means that if I choose a larger introductory verse section, I must economize on words elsewhere, and "Lord" is a helluva lot shorter than "Dear God and Father of Mankind."
I am aware that this is an extremely minor example, and that larger differences exist between the texts marked as J, E, D, and P, and the various bits of Isaiah, etc. I am not saying otherwise. What I am saying is that it is very, very risky to notice a textual feature and decide that you know how and why it came about--unless you can consult the author or otherwise possess hard evidence (e.g. a series of manuscript copies in various states). (Which, by the way, is what my dissertation was about--a good old five year exercise in filiating manuscripts and printed editions by internal evidence, tracing textual trees, and so forth. We even had a freaking Q document!)
So I am VERY suspicious of anyone, biblical, classical, or otherwise, who imagines that on the basis of the text alone they can look backward in time and say that there were multiple authors, or that this bit was written before that bit, or that this text is clearly a response to that historical event. Even Tolkien did not escape from being supposed to be writing all about the atomic bomb with his One Ring. And sheer timing would tell you otherwise.
C. S. Lewis, by the way, has said much the same thing as I've just done in his writings, having been very much annoyed by people pontificating about the way his texts came about--when he had personal knowledge of just how wrong they were. If people do this to a (then) living author, of roughly the same cultural background, and still fail, how much less likely are we to get it right when we try to do it to authors who are millennia removed from us?
So no. IMHO the best way to deal with the text is to accept it for what it is, weirdnesses and all--to note those weirdnesses, but remain cautious about saying why they exist--and to get on with more fruitful endeavors (such as "What does this text have to say to us? Is there anything in its cultural milieu (via languages, archaeology, history) that might help me understand it better? What poetic devices is it using to get its message across? Why precisely do I enjoy this text so much (if I do)? Having read this, how then should we live?" and the like).
ISTM the really important warning that emerges from JEPD and the like is that we are dealing with a text that has been manhandled by a lot of people over the years. It is still true that an awful lot of religious people treat every jot and tittle of scripture as a pristine communication from the Almighty, As long as that tendency persists, JEPD will provide a valuable service. Or so ISTM.
For my money, JEPD and similar hypotheses are interesting from a “how did we get the Bible?” standpoint, but I don’t see them as particularly helpful in understanding the story the Bible is telling. As I approach scripture, I see them as the writings/stories of a community, not of individual authors, and they’ve ended up where they have because of how the community has told the stories over time. So when I approach, say, the story of Jacob, I’m concerned with the story as we have it. Whether part of that story is ascribed Elohist origins while another part is assigned Yahwist origins is, to me, pretty irrelevant.
But this is almost certainly veering into territory for another thread.
Another way of putting this is, "Everyone wants to deconstruct Jeremiah and be seen as a revolutionary thinker, but nobody wants to spend five years identifying all the puns and geographical allusions for future scholars, even though that would be a truly useful piece of work to have around for centuries to come."
Because lazy.
Trust me, I was a grad student!
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Now am I dead,
Now am I fled;
My soul is in the sky:
Tongue, lose thy light;
Moon take thy flight:
Now die, die, die, die, die.
What traditional historical criticism had identified as unevenness in the text indicating a bringing together of different sources, the narrative approach would often see as the narrative technique of a skilled author, often using oral techniques which expect a text to be heard rather than read. There were not many areas where both explanations of the ‘unevenness’ were possible.
My two further reservations about the traditional historical-critical approach were first that it tended to have unconvincing assumptions about how the text got into its final form.
Either it was presumed that the disjuncts in the text were unnoticed by the compiler, just lying in wait for a sufficiently educated C19th or C20th westerner to find them. Or it was presumed that there was some kind of reverence for the underlying sources that didn’t prevent a major cut-and-paste job, but did prevent actually changing anything in the source text. So, it was as if the supposed compiler thought, I don’t mind cutting up bits of J and sticking them on to bits of E, but I draw the line at altering them in any other way.
Secondly the traditional historical-critical approach has a bit of a tendency to leave one, metaphorically speaking with a handful of dead leaves. Various sources might be identified, but an overall meaning for the text disappears. Brevard Childs and others in the realm of canonical criticism are IMHO one of the responses to biblical criticism’s loss of the meaning of texts.
I’m now also thinking about how oral traditions would have been affected / changed by being ‘translated’ into the written word.
Another mystery I am still working on is the story of Abraham and Issac. We know both of them went up the hill. We are told God intervened at the last moment to save Isaac, but why is it only Abraham is mentioned as coming down the hill?
Now, in the case of Jacob and the Elohist version of the angels ascending and descending a ladder and the Yahwist story of the struggle in the night, I also wonder if they may be two versions of the same story, one being more peaceful, and the other one more violent. They have the same outcome. God blesses Jacob, with the Yahwist adding that Jacobs's new name is Israel. Then the question arises, why did the redactor of Genesis put the two together?
Looking at your first question, I think a usually unaddressed issue in relation to the early chapters of Genesis is the question of genre. Basically if you read it as a historical or history-like narrative then you get tied in to a six-day creation. If you read it as something more like a theological parable you still receive the teaching of (inter alia) a God who brings the universe into being by his word, of a created order which is fundamentally good, and which is designedly hospitable to human life, and of human beings created in the image of God. You are not, however, having to wrestle with, for example, how day and night and light and darkness existed before sun, moon and stars.
As far as Gen 22 is concerned ISTM that giving any kind of weight to the non-mention of Isaac is an over-reading of the text. The verse says But we don’t (reasonably) ask if only Abraham is mentioned as living at Beer Sheba where did the young men go? We assume that they continued with Abraham in his household. In narrative terms the separate presence of Isaac on the way to the mountain has to be stated in the narration to set the scene for the conversation between him and Abraham, and to make it clear that Abraham has obeyed. Once the crisis is resolved Isaac’s return down the mountain is included in Abraham by a kind of metonymy.
In the Jacob/Israel narrative Jacob’s two encounters with God are both in moments of peak vulnerability first as he leaves and second as he returns ‘home’. In the first encounter God promises to bless him, and Jacob’s promise in response is ‘If you bless me, I will…’. But then Jacob goes on and continues his tricky cheating way, as if God is not to be trusted (and meets a nearly equal trickster in Laban). In the second encounter Jacob’s determination to secure his own blessing, and his lack of trust in the promise are challenged by him being brought to a point of helplessness. This is the moment of the new name, and I’ve seen it argued that in narrative terms there’s a kind of Sméagol/Gollum thing going on after that where sometimes he is Jacob and sometimes Israel.
Even if the varied use of YHWH and Elohim does indicate different clearly demarcated literary sources or oral traditions (and IMHO, the jury’s out on that), the person or people who put them together had something to say to us in the way they combined the sources and produced what we now have. Going back to the hypothetical sources leaves us with narrative fragments which may represent only parts of a larger text, and whose meaning or significance within that hypothetical text are now irrecoverable.
Well, I tried to remember where I got the Lewis stuff (he has a huge corpus of work, which all runs together in my head at this point) and found this, his "Fernseed and Elephants" essay, which is not a bad place to start. https://normangeisler.com/fernseeds-elephants/ There are likely to be other places he addresses such issues, both for the Bible and for texts like Shakespeare, Homer, etc. (He was a Classics man who ended up writing the Oxford History of English Literature volume Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), so he's got expertise in both. I'd try the various collections of his essays that are out there.
If you're interested in the way orality vs. literacy (or digitalism (?)) affects texts and authors, try Walter Ong, who has several books on the subject, including (of course) Orality and Literacy and also The Presence of the Word.
One very important thing to remember (which is rather a "yeah, duh" moment for me) is that communities do not author texts; individuals do. In the end it comes down to one person opening his/her mouth, taking up his/her pen, sitting at his/her keyboard--and making decisions on how to tell a story. Texts simply do not "grow" organically, as a great deal of critical literature implies through its phrasing. Every change that is made, is made for a reason (either intentional or accidental). And THAT means that we have a fighting chance of understanding the text and what the author meant by it, simply by virtue of being fellow human beings. We may not belong to his/her time and culture, but we can learn as much as possible about that spot in space/time, and also draw on our own knowledge of human nature to help. That is sometimes shockingly illuminating--and other times, mundanely illuminating, but still, I'll take whatever I can get.
We may have attended the same church body for a while, but I did not grow up in a Christian tradition. I'm a convert. And that, mainly through reading the Bible in isolation from other Christians and their input. I came to the Missouri Synod with grave suspicions about what they were going to do with "my" book...
I don't want to bore everybody by getting totally long-winded (you've already failed, LC!). So just a few points that help me to navigate such texts--
First of all, whenever people claim that there are two conflicting stories in Genesis (or Mark, or what have you)--
You've heard of an overview, haven't you? It is a really common technique in writing, TV, and teaching to go over a sequence of events in a very broad-strokes way, and then return and do a close-up focus on the bit you think needs more attention. Human beings do this all the time. I take the first (!) story of Creation to be the overview, and the second to be a close-up on a particular bit of it that concerns human beings most closely. (No doubt if we were trees, we'd get a "second" story that focused on details about dendrological creation.)
I don't want to bore everybody by getting totally long-winded (you've already failed, LC!). So just a few points that help me to navigate such texts--
First of all, whenever people claim that there are two conflicting stories in Genesis (or Mark, or what have you)--
You've heard of an overview, haven't you? It is a really common technique in writing, TV, and teaching to go over a sequence of events in a very broad-strokes way, and then return and do a close-up focus on the bit you think needs more attention. Human beings do this all the time. I take the first (!) story to be the overview, and the second to be a close-up on a particular bit of it that concerns human beings most closely. (No doubt if we were trees, we'd get a "second" story that focused on details about dendrological creation.)
The same technique explains the differences between "take two of every creature on board the Ark" and "take seven pairs of every clean animal". God gives the general direction that is going to apply to every kind of creature, but then he zooms down to deal with a small subset of creatures who are going to get special treatment. I do this with my son all the time. "I need you to load everything into the dishwasher, and make sure you get everything--I don't want to see any dirty dishes in the sink when I get home.... Don't forget that the good knives need to be washed by hand!" This is no contradiction, it is expanding on a detail. (And if my kid tried to sass me by pointing out that I'd already told him to load "everything" into the dishwasher, he'd get a yank on the ear and the recommendation not to be a smart ass.)
Now, re Abraham--
I assume you are referring to this bit in Genesis 22:19: "Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba." Consider: The exciting bit of the story is over. Surely it is very natural for the author to revert to his usual habit of naming the main character in his narrative as going somewhere, and trusting that the reader will mentally fill in the blanks?
What I mean by this can be seen even in the second half of the verse--"And Abraham stayed in Beersheba." If we were to be utterly pedantic, we would insist on this being written "And Abraham and his family and his servants and his herds and flocks all stayed in Beersheba together." But nobody talks that way. It takes us way too much paper (or parchment) and it drives the reader/listener freaking bonkers.
Of COURSE an Old Testament patriarch traveled with a large household. We have already been shown the members of that large household in Genesis, over and over and over again. Nobody imagines that 100-year-old-plus Abraham set out on his lonesome with a bedroll and a backpack to camp in Beersheba all by himself. Everybody knows here that "Abraham" is shorthand for "Abraham & Co."
That being the case, it makes perfect sense that the previous bit of the verse "Then Abraham returned to his servants" includes Isaac, the donkey (if they had one), and so forth. There's no need to name Isaac, we've just had it made immensely clear that he survived Mount Moriah, and where else would he be now but with his Dad? Why waste paper (or breath) on such a detail?
This is what I mean by considering human nature. Human beings have a tendency to talk in certain ways, to emphasize and omit details according to certain patterns, and while culture affects this to a certain degree, you can see the broad similarities across narratives from all human cultures. The rules are a) tell a story we can understand; b) tell a story we're actually interested in; c) give us enough detail that we stay understanding and interested; d) leave out anything that will bore us to tears; e) if it's going to be complicated, consider doing an overview first; f) if we're really, really interested in one tiny aspect of the big story, tell us more about it, maybe after dinner's over and we bring out the drinks.
This is excellent, and I am so glad that people have addressed these issues. I got such a distaste for most (not all) literary criticism during my grad school years that I have avoided it where I can ever since. (Used to feel like a fool screaming in the wilderness while a certain nameless professor of mine laughed me to scorn for taking the text --in that case, Shakespeare--at all seriously. We were supposed to be far more interested in the rubble left over once the play had been collapsed.)
Of course, an overview is usually shorter than the detailed story. My favorite explanation of the two creation stories is from Philo of Alexandria (a Jewish neo-Platonist contemporary of Jesus.) He thought that the first story was how God envisioned creation and the second was what happened when God's idea was instantiated in matter.
I think there is a middle ground here. The text does indeed convey the teachings you talk about, and that's the main point, of course. But taking it as a narrative of what actually happened does not in fact tie you in to the comic-book version of a six-day creation. Indeed, on a close reading it cannot, as it's not possible to have 24-hour-days when the sun and moon are not yet created...
For a text this distant from us, I try to make sure I come to it with massive heaping doses of humility and "I don't know" in tow. Because I don't. For example, I really like the fact that light is the first creation, and how beautifully that matches up with the Big Bang theory (because you'd expect light from an explosion, right?). But if the BBT goes under tomorrow, scientifically speaking, I don't want to be the person who's tied her biblical understanding to a toppled theory with an unbreakable knot. Better to say, "It looks like this to me," and let God correct me as needed.