Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
As one sees the face of God
Genesis 33:1-20
1 Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau was coming, and with him four hundred men. He divided the children between Leah, Rachel, and the two servants. · WEB
The brother he has feared for twenty years runs and embraces him, and Jacob cannot quite believe it enough to travel with him.
Esau appears with his four hundred men and Jacob arranges his family in order of what he can afford to lose — servants and their children in front, Leah and hers behind, and Rachel and Joseph at the rear.
It is a sensible battle formation and it is a cruelty. The ranking is public and everyone in it can count. Leah has spent her life being second and now stands in the middle of a defensive line with her six children while the favored wife is placed out of reach.
But Jacob himself goes first — He himself passed over in front of them — and bows seven times on the way, which is the protocol for approaching a king. The man who was told nations would bow to him crawls the last hundred yards.
And then everything the chapter has been dreading dissolves in one verse: Esau ran to meet him, embraced him, fell on his neck, kissed him, and they wept.
Four verbs and no words. Esau runs — the brother with the army runs — and there is no negotiation, no accounting, and no mention of the birthright or the blessing. Whatever twenty years had done to Esau, it had not preserved the hatred he left with, and Genesis gives no explanation for the change. It simply happens, and the two of them stand in the road and cry.
The conversation that follows is a study in two temperaments. Esau's questions are direct and his refusals are generous: I have enough, my brother; let that which you have be yours. He does not want the animals.
Jacob presses the gift on him anyway, and the sentence he uses to do it is the most important in the chapter: I have seen your face, as one sees the face of God, and you were pleased with me.
He named a place Peniel the night before, because he had seen God face to face and lived. Now he looks at the brother he defrauded and says the same thing. The two encounters are set side by side deliberately — an all-night struggle with God, then a morning meeting with the man he wronged — and Jacob's own verdict is that surviving the second was of the same order as surviving the first. Reconciliation with a brother is described in the vocabulary of seeing God.
He also says I have enough, which is the same phrase Esau used, and it is worth marking in a man who has spent his life taking.
And then, having said all that, he will not travel with him. He pleads the children and the nursing flocks, promises to come on gently until I come to my lord to Seir, declines an escort — and goes to Succoth and then to Shechem instead. He never goes to Seir. The old habit of saying what will get him out of the room survives the new name by about a paragraph.
What he does at Shechem is the chapter's quiet achievement. He bought the parcel of ground where he had spread his tent for a hundred pieces of money — the second piece of land the family has ever owned in Canaan, after a grave — and erected an altar there, and called it El Elohe Israel, God, the God of Israel. He uses his new name in the name of the altar.
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