The Victorious Defeat

Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.  Genesis 32:24  NASB

Wrestled with him – In my book Crossing: The Struggle for Identity I show that this very unusual story has a deep psychological element.  No explanation of who this strange opponent is really satisfies until we recognize that Jacob is in an intense battle with himself.  It is his new persona who fights for control while Jacob wrestles to regain the world that is slipping away.  Unexpectedly, we find that Jacob must be defeated in order to progress.  If you’ve ever felt the pull of your past clawing to keep you in the rut you’ve lived with while you hope to step across your Jabbok, then you’ll identify with Jacob’s night long battle.

Frederick Buechner describes it like this:

He merely touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and in a moment Jacob is lying there crippled and helpless.  The sense we have, which Jacob must have had, that the whole battle was from the beginning fated to end this way, that the stranger had simply held back until now, letting Jacob exert all this strength and almost win so that when he was defeated, he would know that he was truly defeated; so that he would know that not all the shrewdness, will, brute force that he could muster were enough to get this.  Jacob will not release his grip, only now it is a grip not of violence but of need, like the grip of a drowning man.[1]

What is the result?  For Jacob it’s the confirmation of a new persona, Israel, a persona that has been lying dormant in Jacob’s manufactured ego and is now revealed to the world and to Jacob’s own consciousness.  It is not a persona of prosperity and peace.  Israel will be the man who struggles with other men and with God, but he will persevere.  The rest of his life will be the conflict of yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov, but in the end God’s purposes will prevail.  Why?  Because Jacob has learned something every one must learn:

“Not a blessing that he can have now by the strength of his cunning or the force of his will, but a blessing that he can have only as a gift.  Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy are only from God.”[2]

“God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things that I can and wisdom to know the difference.”

Jacob wrestled.  The Hebrew verb is ʾābaq which occurs only in this story.  More importantly, it is found only in the Niphal tense, that is, a passive, reflexive tense.  It is as if the text read, “Jacob wrestled with himself.”  Furthermore, this consonant construction is found only one other place, in Song of Songs 3:6 where it describes powder (like perfumed powder).  It is a word about something very finely ground like dust, and as I point out in my book, Jacob is in fact wrestling with his essence, the dust God used to make him a human being.  He wrestles with the man he has made of himself from the dust God created, and now, in this defeat, he discovers what that dust was all about.

Have you?

Topical Index:  Jacob, wrestle, ʾābaq, dust, Buechner, defeat, Genesis 32:24

[1] Frederick Buechner  Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (HarperOne, 2006), p. 7.

[2] Ibid.