Peniel

This is the first prayer the Book of Genesis records from Jacob, and he is sixty odd years into a life full of dealings. The man who bargained at Bethel with a conditional vow, if God will be with me and keep me, is here asking without conditions.

The opening move is to quote God back to God. The LORD which saidst unto me, Return unto thy country, and to thy kindred, and I will deal well with thee. Jacob is not reminding himself. He is pointing out that he is where he is because he was told to be, and the appeal rests on the instruction rather than on his own standing.

I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies translates a single Hebrew verb, qatonti, meaning I have been made small. It is the confession of a man who has spent twenty years becoming larger and is describing the effect in the opposite direction.

The measure he gives is exact and domestic: with my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands. One stick, then two camps. He is counting his own increase in a prayer about being afraid of what it might cost him, and the two bands are the arrangement he made in the previous verses in case Esau destroys one of them.

When he saw that he prevailed not against him. The subject of that clause is the man, not Jacob, and the sentence says plainly that the stranger could not win. What follows is a touch rather than a blow. The hollow of Jacob's thigh is put out of joint by contact, which suggests that the contest had not been conducted at full strength up to that point.

Let me go, for the day breaketh. The reason offered is daylight, and the account does not explain why that should matter. Jewish tradition has the angel needing to return for the morning praise; other readers have connected it to the danger stated in verse 30, that seeing God is not survivable. The Book of Genesis says only that the request was made and refused.

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me is a demand made by a man who has just been crippled, to someone he cannot beat, while holding on with a dislocated hip. Jacob has spent his life obtaining blessings by arrangement, a bowl of pottage, a goatskin on his arms, a bargain over spotted cattle. Here he asks for one directly and will not move until it is given.

Jacob names the place Peniel, the face of God, and the next verse spells it Penuel. The Book of Genesis uses both forms in consecutive sentences and does not treat the difference as worth remarking on; later books use Penuel.

His reason is given as a survival. I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. This is Jacob's own interpretation and the first identification of the stranger in the chapter, made after the fact by the man who wrestled him. The account has said only a man. The prophet Hosea, reading this centuries later, says he had power over the angel and prevailed, weeping and making supplication, and adds the detail of tears that the Book of Genesis does not record.

And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh. The sunrise is the counterpart of another sentence about this man. At Bethel, twenty years earlier, he lay down because the sun was set. The night that began there ends here, and he comes out of it with a new name and a permanent limp. The account puts the blessing and the injury in the same clause and does not rank them.