Biblion Bible Commentary
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I will not let you go unless you bless me
Genesis 32:22-32
22 He rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of the Jabbok. · WEB
Alone at a ford in the dark, Jacob is asked his name — and this time he tells the truth, which is what he could not do at his father's bedside.
He sends everyone across the ford and stays behind. Jacob was left alone — for the first time since the night at Bethel, and in the same condition: on the ground, in the dark, with the future uncertain.
And wrestled with a man there until the breaking of the day. No explanation is offered for who begins it or why. The narrative simply reports a man, and a fight that lasts most of a night.
What kind of contest it is becomes clear at the turn: When he saw that he didn't prevail against him, the man touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was strained. A touch does what a night of grappling did not. Whatever was happening, the opponent had not been using his strength.
And then Jacob, injured and unable to stand properly, holds on: I won't let you go unless you bless me. It is the most characteristic sentence of his life. He has spent sixty years extracting blessings — from a brother, from a father, from a father-in-law's flocks — and here he is doing it again, crippled, in the dark, and this time from God.
The reply is a question, and it is the hinge of the entire book: What is your name?
He is not being asked for information. The last time Jacob was asked to say who he was, he was standing at his blind father's bed in his brother's clothes with goatskin on his arms, and he said I am Esau your firstborn Genesis 27:19. That lie bought him everything and cost him twenty years.
Now the same question, and the answer is one word: Jacob. Supplanter. Heel-grabber. He says the name he had lied about, admits what he is, and gets a new one in the same breath.
Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed. Not because he won — he is limping — but because he held on. And an inspired later comment fills in what the narrative leaves out: he wept, and made supplication to him Hosea 12:4. The wrestling included weeping and begging.
His own question is turned back: Why is it that you ask what my name is? He is blessed and not told. The identity of the man is left where the text leaves it — Jacob says I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved, and names the place Peniel, the face of God — and a reader who wants more than that is asking for what the passage declines to give.
Then the sunrise, and one of the great sentences in Scripture: The sun rose on him as he passed over Peniel, and he limped because of his thigh.
He has a new name, a blessing, and a permanent injury, and he got all three in the same night. He will walk with that limp for the rest of his life, and the last time we see him he is leaning on the top of his staff to worship Hebrews 11:21. The blessing and the wound are the same event.
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