Jacob Wrestled

"That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man." Genesis 32:22-25

The passage for today’s bible study was on Genesis 32. The story sets off with Jacob sending off all that he had across the river to greet his brother, Esau, in hopes that his brother’s anger may be subsided.

I caught a habit of visualizing what I read in the bible, at least to some extent. I imagined a rather desert-like area with a river of a decent width. Jacob is left sitting alone on a rock, perhaps with some sheets for comfort. Now, suddenly, he starts wrestling a man. He just starts wrestling a man. I looked up the Hebrew word for ‘wrestle’ to see if there was any meaning that got lost in translation, but there were none. The Hebrew term was ‘abaq’ which seemed to have its origin in ‘dust’ that correlated to “dust-ify”, henceforth, wrestle. The timeframe starts with ‘that night’ and is extended to ‘daybreak.’ By taking ‘night’ to mean the sun setting, the earliest time would be around 5PM, and ‘daybreak,’ taken to mean sunrise, would be to around 7AM, all in Israel time. That is a good 12 hours.

How did Jacob even meet this guy? Did he appear out of nowhere?

After having asked this question, a good follow-up passage was pointed out, which was Genesis 18. It says, “The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.” Genesis 18:1-2

Abraham had a similar encounter, assuming that all these ‘men’ were angels of God. Abraham must have had some notion of holiness, or, a difference in these ‘men.’ Abraham does not wrestle with these men, but rather, escorts them and treats them. One in common though, is that he, too, asked them to stick around.

I really did not have a clear message in mind when I started writing about this passage. I just wanted to point the facts out. In simply reading the translated passage, all we see is that Jacob randomly started wrestling a man for half a day’s time. What should this mean for us? That we should be aware of God’s angels passing by? Or that he should find in our hearts, a desire to wrestle with God in body or in mind?

Who wrestles someone in these times anyways?